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USCHS administrator selected to PA Principals Association Board of Directors
The Pennsylvania Principals Association recently named Daniel J. Beck, Upper St. Clair High School assistant principal, to its newly established Assistant Principal at Large board position.
In his new role, Mr. Beck will represent the perspective of assistant principals as related to the work of an educational leader in today’s schools; serve as a key practitioner’s voice on the Board of Directors relating to the role of assistant principal; as well as providing information and input related to the needs and concerns of assistant principals.
“He brings to the association a passion for reaching those in the assistant principal position and his past experience and ideas for recruiting and retaining fellow assistant principals,” Paul M. Healey, Ph.D., executive director of the Pennsylvania Principals Association, said.
Mr. Beck joined the Upper St. Clair High School leadership staff in 2013. Previously, he taught secondary English in the Greensburg Salem School District and the Berlin Brothers Valley School District.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in secondary English education from Duquesne University; a master’s of education from the University of Pittsburgh; and is currently a doctoral and Superintendent’s Letter of Eligibility candidate at Duquesne University.
The Assistant Principal at Large board position is one of two newly established positions on the association’s board of directors. Eduardo L. Antonetti, supervisor of curriculum and assessment at Mid Valley Secondary Center in the Mid Valley School District in Throop, Pa., was recently appointed as the Diversity At Large board member.
“We are delighted with the addition of these two important positions on the Board of Directors,” Dr. Healey said. “They will bring a very vital and unique set of experiences and both will provide a very important voice to be heard as a part of our board.”
Both board members will serve two-year terms.
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Celebrating Sake Dean Mahomed
(Celebrating Sake Dean Mahomed Google Doodle)
"The Benefits of Shampooing" book by Sake Dean Mahomed (Source)
Google Doodle recently celebrated an influential figure from the history of Muslim civilisation.
Sake Dean Mahomed, the “Shampooing Surgeon” to both George IV and William IV, has an interesting story:
"In the 1770s and 1780s, Brighton, England, was a blossoming beach resort and it was at this scene that Sake (Sheikh, but because of accents this became Sake) Dean Mahomed arrived. Sake Dean Mahomed was from a Muslim family in Patna, India, and in 1759 opened what was known as Mahomed’s Indian Vapour Baths on the Brighton seafront, the site of what is now the Queen’s Hotel. These baths were similar to Turkish baths, but clients were placed in a flannel tent and received an Indian treatment of shampooing or therapeutic massage from a person whose hands came through slits in the flannel. This remarkable “vaporing” and shampooing bath led him to receive the ultimate accolade of being appointed “Shampooing Surgeon” to both George IV and William IV." [1001 Inventions: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilization: Reference (4th) Edition Annotated, Text only. (Kindle Locations 687-694]
You may be interested in discovering more celebrated figures from that period honoured by Google Doodle.
What is Sake Dean Mahomed’s legacy? Google Doodle honours Anglo-Indian entrepreneur - the talented physician known as 'Dr Brighton' counted two Kings among his patients (Source)
Google Doodle mentions him as follows:
"A man of many talents, Sake Dean Mahomed was an entrepreneur who made a name for himself by building cultural connections between India and England. On this day in 1794, he became the first Indian author to publish a book in English and later, to open an Indian restaurant in England—ushering in what would become one of Great Britain’s most popular cuisines. Mahomed went on to find success as the “The Shampooing Surgeon of Brighton,” opening a spa in the British seaside town that attracted the rich and royal.
In 1810, after moving to London, Mahomed opened the Hindostanee Coffee House, Britain’s first Indian restaurant. The Epicure’s Almanack—an early London restaurant guide—hailed it as a place for nobility to enjoy hookah and Indian dishes of the highest perfection. Nonetheless, Mahomed was forced to close his luxurious restaurant in 1812 and sought to reinvent himself.
Moving his family to the beachside town of Brighton, he opened a spa named Mahomed’s Baths offering luxurious herbal steam baths. His specialty was a combination of a steam bath and an Indian therapeutic massage—a treatment he named “shampooing” inspired by the Hindi word champissage meaning “a head massage.” He also published a book about the therapeutic benefits of the treatment with testimonials from his patients. In 1822, King George IV appointed Mahomed as his personal ‘shampooing surgeon’, which greatly improved his business. A portrait of Mahomed hangs in the Brighton Museum, commemorating this man who helped merge the cultures of his two homelands.
Happy Birthday, Sake Dean Mahomed!"
"Between 1812 and 1814 Sake Dean Mahomed (Sheikh Din Muhammad) moved to Brighton and subsequently opened a bath-house. He provided aromatic vapour baths, massage and shampooing. In his peak he opened one on the sea front on Kings Road and treated King George IV and King William IV being awarded Warrants of Appointments as ‘Shampooing Surgeon’." (Source)
"The "shampooer of kings" who opened London's first curry cafe was a celebrity in the 19th century..." (Source)
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Delicious Tweets, just two of them
[ by Charles Cameron — further musings on form in 140 characters or less ]
Either my appetite for serpents biting their tails and the like has diminished, or they are all in hibernation. Since I last posted, I’ve only found two that I’d care to show you…
I want to write an app that's billed as a malware removal tool. You pay $1, and when you run it, it deletes itself.
— Marcus Ranum (@mjranum) March 17, 2014
Just passed a shop called Nostalgia. Closed down. I want an open shop next to it called Schadenfreude.
— George Szirtes (@george_szirtes) February 26, 2014
Hiber-nation: Scotland, without the appendages?
Posted in Charles Cameron, form, twitter, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Delicious Tweets, just two of them
New Book: American Spartan by Ann Scott Tyson
[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]
American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant by Ann Scott Tyson
Was just sent a review copy of American Spartan courtesy of Callie at Oettinger & Associates which tells the story of Major Jim Gant, the special forces officer and AfPak hand who pushed hard for a controversial strategy in Afghanistan based on arming and training loyalist paramilitaries out of Afghan tribesmen ( or whatever localist network would suffice when tribal identity was weak or absent). I am looking forward to reading this book for a number of reasons.
Long time readers may recall Gant coming to wider attention with his paper, One Tribe at a Time with an assist from noted author Steven Pressfield, where he called for a campaign strategy against the Taliban from “the bottom up” using “the tribes” because the current top down strategy of killing insurgents while building a strong, centralized, state would never work – the war would just drag on indefinitely until the US grew tired and quit Afghanistan ( as is happening….now). Gant, who forged a tight relationship with Afghan tribal leader Noor Azfal ,won some fans with his paper in very high places, including SECDEF Robert Gates and Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus who gave him some cover to implement his ideas but he also faced formidable resistance and criticism. Academic experts were particularly incensed by Gant’s broad-brush use of “tribes” to cover a wide array of local networks and Afghan identities and that “tribes” were a term modern anthropology held in deep disdain ( RAND’s David Ronfeldt pointed out that while these networks are not historical tribes they are certainly “tribal” in terms of behavior patterns) while the government of Mohammed Karzai and its American boosters were bitterly hostile to any strategy that might arm locals outside Kabul’s direct control.
It was also a risky strategy. Loyalist paramilitaries are often very effective in a military sense – as happened in Colombia when the government tolerated and encouraged private militias to make war on FARC and the ELN and badly mauled the Communist insurgents – but they are inherently unreliable politically. Paramilitaries can also “go off the reservation” – this also happened in Colombia – and commit atrocities or become criminal enterprises or engage in warlordism and have to be reined in by the government. All of these were particular risks in the context of Afghanistan where warlordism and drug trafficking had been particularly acute problems even under Taliban rule. On the other hand, warlordism and drug trafficking has hardly been unknown in the ANA regular units and national police and is hardly the province only of irregulars.
Another reason I am interested in this book is the subtitle’s accusation of “betrayal” which I infer comes out of the long institutional cultural and chain of command clashes of bureaucratic politics between Big Army and Special Forces and Special Operations Forces communities. The long history in the big picture is that many general purpose force commanders do not know how to use these troops to best strategic effect and sometimes resent the autonomy with which they operate ( a resentment returned and repaid at times with a lack of consultation and ignoring of local priorities in operational planning).
The author, Ann Scott Tyson is a long-time and experienced war reporter who embedded extensively with US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. She is also married to her subject which should make for some interesting analysis when I review the book.
Posted in 21st century, Afghanistan, authors, book, COIN, ideas, leadership, military, networks, non-state actors, steven pressfield, strategy, Strategy and War, Tactics, Taliban, theory, tribes, war, warriors | 13 Comments »
Wednesday, March 5th, 2014
[exhumed by Lynn C. Rees]
If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble but neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.
– Theodore Roosevelt
One of the great strategic failures of the twentieth century was the failure to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle. For France and Britain, the failure arose from a desire to reconstitute the Russian Empire as it was before World War I with White armies, general war weariness by their populations after four years of bloody war, and a belief that no one as crazy as the Bolsheviks could endure in power. Winston Churchill warned of danger ahead but, as he was through most of his career, he was a prophet without honor in his own country on a good day and a stereotypical aristocratic English crank on a bad day. France and Britain would suffer a century of war, loss of their preeminence, and the fundamental corruption of their liberal institutions as a result.
The motives of the United States, new to this world power thing, were weakly held at worst and ambivalently held at best. They intervened in Russia primarily for reasons of Allied/“Associated Power” solidarity, to rescue a large army raised from former Austro-Hungarian Czech POWs that needed to be shipped to the Western Front, to seize Allied arms provided to the Imperial Russian government before the February Revolution, and to protect American property. Much to the chagrin of Allied commanders, American soldiers largely focused on that mission and not on the cause of supporting Russians fighting the Bolsheviks. Stopping a Red Menace in Russia that would threaten the U.S. after 1945 was not on the American agenda. Coming home was.
Poland did not have such a luxury. For Poland, Russia was all to close. Much as they would have wished the Atlantic to shift eastwards and separate Poland from Russia, Jozef Pilsudski, the father of Polish independence, had to have a strategy to counter a Russian empire that was right next door. The curious thing: he developed and started executing his strategy before Poland was even a state.
Pilsudski was born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. His family was minor nobility who’d risen and fought against Russia during Poland’s habitual escape attempts from the Prison of Nations. In school, Pilsudski was subjected to Russification but only learned to hate Russia, the Czar, Russian Orthodoxy, the Russian language, and Russian culture. He went to medical school but soon involved himself in pro-Polish independence movements. As with many, this led to arrest and a Siberian vacation. He was later released, returned to Poland, took up agitation again, and was imprisoned again. Pilsudski escaped (escape from Russian prisons was surprisingly common for revolutionaries like Pilsudski, Dzerzhinsky, and Stalin) and went into exile.
It was here that Pilsudski proposed the first version of his Promethean strategy to the Japanese after their war with Russia War broke out:
Poland’s strength and importance among the constituent parts of the Russian state embolden us to set ourselves the political goal of breaking up the Russian state into its main constituents and emancipating the countries that have been forcibly incorporated into that empire. We regard this not only as the fulfillment of our country’s cultural strivings for independent existence, but also as a guarantee of that existence, since a Russia divested of her conquests will be sufficiently weakened that she will cease to be a formidable and dangerous neighbor.
Pilsudski was proposing a grand strategy that echoed French strategy from Richelieu down to the bumbling Luigi Nabulione Buonaparte: keep a large neighboring proto-nation, in France’s case Germany, from being united under a state whose combined strength would constitute a mortal threat. Britain followed a similar strategy by keeping Europe divided by supporting whoever ganged up against the latest aspiring continental hegemon. In Pilsudski’s scheming, Russia, the Prison of Nations, was to be permanently checked by opening the prison’s locks and letting the prisoners out.
Japan, aiming to disrupt rather than destroy, provided Pilsudski with just enough resources to create distractions for Russia during the 1905 Russian Revolution but not enough to gain independence. Stymied, Pilsudski removed to Austrian Poland and sat down to an intricate game. Foreseeing a general European War, Pilsudski, with Austrian connivance, started building up a Polish Legion. Officers and NCOs were trained, agents were sent into Poland to assassinate Russian officials and steal money, and troops were trained under the fiction of setting up sporting clubs and a Rifleman’s Association. When World War I broke out, Pilsudski led 12,000 paramilitaries. At a meeting in Paris in 1914:
Pisudski presciently declared that in the impending war, for Poland to regain independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the latter powers must in their turn be beaten by France, Britain and the United States.
Pilsudski formed an official Polish Legion to fight for Austria-Hungary against Russia while secretly informing the British that his forces would only fight Russia, not Britain and France. Pilsudski gained military experience by leading his forces in several battles with the Russians on the Eastern Front. After one encounter in which the Polish Legion suffered heavy casualties in successfully defending against a Russian attack, Pilsudski was able to coax the Germans and Austrians into declaring Poland independent. Under the new Polish government established by the Central Powers, Pilsudski served as minister of war but increasingly took an independent position as the war drew to an end. After refusing to permit the Polish Legion to swear allegiance to Germany and Austria, Pilsudski was imprisoned by the Germans, the Polish Legion disbanded, and its men incorporated into the Austrian army. But, as Germany approached Armistice Day, they decided to create mischief. They released Pilsudski from prison and sent him back to Poland in a sealed train (like Lenin).
On Armistice Day 1918, Poland declared her independence. Pilsudski eased German troops from Poland (usefully leaving their weapons behind) and, as head of state, began organizing Poland as an independent state with its own government and army. The other leg of his strategy was revealed at this time: Intermarum. Pilsudski sought to create:
[A] federation, under Poland‘s aegis, of Central and Eastern European countries. Invited to join the proposed federation were the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia.
This federation would be an explicit counter to Germany and a rump Russia and an implicit counter to Britain and France. Curiously, in reference to the future, it would have been a kind of positive Warsaw Pact. Unfortunately for Pilsudski’s scheme, Britain and France opposed such a creature and Poland’s neighbors were too distrustful of Poland and too antagonistic towards each other to make such a pact.
Facing the immediate impracticability of Intermarum, Pilsudski shifted to Prometheism. Observing that “All that we can gain in the west depends on the Entente—on the extent to which it may wish to squeeze Germany”, while in the east “there are doors that open and close, and it depends on who forces them open and how far.” So Pilsudski focused on extending Poland’s eastern frontier.
This is where two of Pilsudski’s actions had a massive effect on the future of the world. When examining the situation in Russia, Pilsudski had a problem:
Pilsudski was aware that the Bolsheviks were no friends of independent Poland, and that war with them was inevitable. He viewed their advance west as a major problem, but also considered the Bolsheviks less dangerous for Poland than their Russian Civil War opponents. These “White Russians”—representative of the old Russian Empire—were willing to accept only limited independence for Poland, probably within borders similar to those of the former Congress Poland, and clearly objected to Polish control of Ukraine, which was crucial for Pilsudski’s Intermarum project.
This was in contrast to the Bolsheviks, who proclaimed the partitions of Poland null and void.Pilsudski thus speculated that Poland would be better off with the Bolsheviks, alienated from the Western powers, than with a restored Russian Empire [allied with Britain and France].
The sheer craziness of the Bolsheviks, as evidenced by such actions as unilaterally declaring peace with German without German agreement, led people to underestimate them. No one that nuts, especially a movement led by coffee-house intellectuals and hippies, could possibly last long against battle hardened White Armies, backed, as they were, by the Allied Powers. So Pilsudski decided not to move against the Bolsheviks in mid-1919. If he’d attacked the Bolsheviks at that time, Polish arms would have destroyed the Bolshevik regime.
Later, the Bolsheviks were drawn west as German forces finally withdrew from Russian territory. Their advancing forces clashed with Polish forces moving eastward. In response, following his Promethean philosophy of encouraging independence among the nationalities of the former Russian Empire, Pilsudski signed an alliance with the Ukraine. Together they attacked the Bolsheviks. After some success, the Russians, raising the specter of the ancient Polish enemy, rallied the Great Russian people and counter-attacked, driving the Poles back into Poland.
This is where a second action of Pilsudski led to historic changes. Here I will channel Niall Ferguson from The Pity of War and conjecture that a collapse of Poland in 1920 would have allowed Bolshevik forces, as they openly proclaimed, to invade Germany and Austria. As Ferguson argued that British intervention on the continent in 1914 saved France from Germany and thus led to all the horrors of World War I and its demon spawn, Polish collapse in 1920 might have triggered an intervention that led to the Bolsheviks being destroyed. While the Reds may not of been successful in occupying Berlin or large parts of central Europe, the Weimar Republic was weak and may have crumbled under even a weak Russian attack. The prospect of Communism advancing into central Europe and threatening western Europe might have triggered a renewed and more vigorous intervention in Russia by the Western Powers, possibly with broad public support. That might have led to the suppression of the Bolshevik regime.
This speculation is, of course, speculation. But opinion of the time, in the words of Norman Davis:
Pilsudski had nothing of his later prestige. As a pre-war revolutionary he led his party to splits and quarrels; as a general in the WWI he led his legions to internment and disbanding; as a marshal of the Polish Army he led it to Kyiv and Vilnius, both now lost to Poles. He left the Polish Socialist Party and his Austro-German allies; refused to ally himself with Entente. In France and England he was considered a treasonous ally who leads Poland into destruction; in Russia he was seen as a false servant of the allies, who would lead imperialism to ruin. All – from Lenin to Lloyd George, from Pravda to Morning Star – considered him a military and political failure. In August 1920 all were in agreement that his catastrophic career will be crowned with the fall of Warsaw.
As it was, Poland fought off the Russian attack under Pilsudski’s military leadership. The Poles had Russian codes and were able to listen in on their communications traffic. The result was Polish victory in the Battle of Warsaw, which featured the last decisive cavalry charges in military history. Russian forces completely collapsed and the Poles completely drove them from Poland. The Bolsheviks sued for peace and Poland’s civilian government, abandoning its Ukrainian allies over Pilsudski’s objections, made peace, and even passed on large territorial gains offered by the Russians in favor of a more compact Poland. Pilsudski’s political opponents, who controlled the government, focused on forming a Poland for the Poles, only accepting territory that contained Polish majorities or populations that could be “polonized”. Belarus and Ukraine, ironically, were partitioned between Poland and Russia. Pilsudski’s two grand strategic schemes were stymied. Poland would pursue neither a federation with an independent Ukraine nor a comprehensive policy of breaking up Russia into smaller and more manageable pieces.
Poland lapsed into a period of internal disorder that only ended when Pilsudski led a coup that overthrew the elected Polish government. Pilsudski became dictator and bloodily restored order to Poland. Authoritarian rule allowed Pilsudski to pursue his two strategic threads. While the Polish government under Pilsudski gave support to exile organizations representing reconquered Russian nationalities, little came of it. Pursuit of Prometheism and Intermarum lapsed after Pilsudski’s death in 1935. The pursuit was utterly extinguished after the outcome the two interwoven strategic threads were meant to prevent, a two front war followed by a fourth partition, took place.
Like many ideas, Prometheism and Intermarum experienced an unexpected reappearance in the last years of the Cold War. In the usual pattern of Special Providence, the United States achieved by accident what Pilsudski sought through design. The Soviet Union was torn down to its constituent nationalities. Even the core Russian Federation was threatened with disunion, fulfilling the ends of Prometheism. Central Europe and the Baltic states were federated under the auspices of the EU and NATO. Even though the first Bush administration sought to preserve the Soviet Union in an ironic echo of Britain and France failed policy in 1918-1919, the people of the Soviet Union took matters into their own hands and frustrated the design of sophisticated American analysts, pundits, and diplomats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Current American policy favors Russia’s reassertion of control over its former territories. While Americans remain oblivious and forget about Russia’s historical ambitions, Russia’s former subjects and its neighbors are well aware of Russia’s tender mercies. If Poland is not pursuing an explicit policy of Prometheism and Intermarum, it may end up pursuing such a policy by default, irrespective of American fickleness and incompetence. It can be argued that the level of Russia’s formal or informal control over its “near abroad” means little to America’s national interests. Indeed, if the Promethean stirrings of 2005-2008 are any evidence, direct American pursuit of such a strategy may prove counter-productive.
American strategy works best when the U.S. can stumble around and, through luck, sheer size, and incoherent friendliness, comically trip and fall on the offending party, crushing them under its bulk. A proverb shared by both America’s friends and enemies is: America: No Better Enemy, No Worse Friend. Skill and finesse are not American strengths, only occurring sporadically and accidentally.
Poland and its neighbors should pray for their own special providence.
Posted in ancient history, counterfactual, Mahdist, polarity | 3 Comments »
The play’s the thing but blood is its trumpet
[resuscitated by Lynn C. Rees]
A book review of Max Hastings’ book Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945:
John F. Kennedy said that in 1940 Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it to battle. But that was the problem. Churchill saw war in rhetorical terms, as pageantry and drama, as though eloquence alone were enough.
At the beginning of the war Evelyn Waugh joined a new unit of the Royal Marines, for which Churchill, when he was first lord of the Admiralty, was responsible. As Waugh dryly put it in a letter, he was “now in a very fine force which Winston is raising in order to provide himself with material for his broadcasts.” Rhetorical was what these forces and their derring-do often were.
What Churchill quite failed to grasp was the importance of sheer mass in modern war, as opposed to “The British Way in Warfare.” That was the title of a book published in November 1942 by Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart, the self-appointed, and sometimes self-important, military oracle, in which he returned to his pet theme: England’s greatness had formerly rested on indirect attack and limited aims, a policy tragically forgotten in 1914.
In a fascinating review that Hastings might have quoted, George Orwell summarized this “traditional strategy” favored by Hart, not to say by Churchill: “You attack your enemy chiefly by means of blockade, privateering and seaborne ‘commando’ raids. You avoid raising a mass army and leave the land fighting as far as possible to continental allies.” What few people seemed to have noticed, Orwell went on, was that for the past three years we had “waged the kind of war that Captain Liddell Hart advocated,” and yet neither he “nor anyone else would argue that this war has gone well for us.”
I once leafed through Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn at a local bookstore. I put it down in disgust: Atkinson’s introduction fawned over the World War II-era British Army. Even by our low national standards, glorification of the World War II-era British Army is a silly exercise in American self-loathing. The British Army started the war badly, fought the war badly, and ended the war badly. Its leaders occasionally rose to adequacy but were almost uniformly terrible. Two British generals, Harold Alexander and His Serene Highness Prince Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas “Chainsaw” von Battenberg Mountbatten were selected for theater command more for their agreeable temperament than their military talent. The one World War II-era British general of any stature among the Great Captains of History was frowned upon by Churchill and exiled to a military backwater.
While American military leaders insisted on a cross-channel invasion in 1942 and 1943 (which would have failed) and incompetent Soviet military leadership killed uncounted millions of Russian soldiers and civilians, they were right on the big picture: the war in Europe would not end until enough military force was brought to bear on the North European Plain to break the Wehrmacht and destroy the Nazi regime.
Churchill’s indirect approach fantasy was built on the proposition that penny packets of American Allied forces landed in small isolated pockets in Italy or the Balkans would somehow drain away significant amounts of German strength. This drainage would occur despite how indirectly approaching Germany from its “soft” Mediterranean underbelly involved directly and repeatedly banging the American’s Allies’ head against the southern face of the Alps. When Italy tried this same indirection during World War I, it worked so well that they went on to make ten sequels.
In contrast, Churchill vehemently opposed an Allied landing in Provence, the Mediterranean gateway to the only significant gap in the mountain ranges guarding southern Europe. He must have instinctively found its strategic rationality offensive. The Allied landing there in 1944, two months after the Normandy landings, was an outstanding victory (as Churchill, to his credit, gracefully admitted).
Churchill was a brilliant scribbler and weaver of narrative but a mediocre to utterly pathetic strategist. While he rightly recognized the core need for an energizing plot line in underscoring any successful war effort, this was not a unique insight or skill among Allied leaders: FDR and Stalin were also masters of story telling. Consider the opening to Stalin’s famous (in Russia) July 3rd, 1941 speech:
Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Men of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!
This is not “never surrender” “finest hour” “owed by so many to so few” “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” inspirational to Western ears, but it was the first and last time Stalin’s rhetoric was personal. Starved for love from their Little Father for so long, Soviet subjects citizens responded to Stalin’s genocidal terror wooden brand of charisma with alacrity. The difference between Churchill and the other Big Two was that FDR and Stalin remembered that, while a strong strategic story is crucial in war, it is not sufficient unto itself. The Carl observes:
Essentially war is fighting, for fighting is the only effective principle in the manifold activities generally designated as war. Fighting, in turn, is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Naturally moral strength must not be excluded, for psychological forces exert a decisive influence on the elements involved in war.
And reiterates:
Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst. The maximum use of force is in no way incompatible with the simultaneous use of the intellect. If one side uses force without compunction, undeterred by the bloodshed it involves, while the other side refrains, the first will gain the upper hand.
The rationale behind Churchill, Brooke, Fuller, Liddell Hart, and Bernard Law Montgomery’s desire to limit British casualties is understandable: there wasn’t enough white Britons to fight the way the Russians and Americans fought. But the message of war is nothing without its medium: bloodshed. Liddell Hart and fellow advocates of “the British way of warfare” willfully ignored this. Both Fuller and Liddell Hart conjured up an undead and unholy Clausewitz roaming the Somme and Passchendaele battlefields, killing off the best British military talent of the next generation while whispering sweet nothings in Field Marshal Haig’s ear. On Flanders field, the “Mahdi of Mass” sucked the lifeblood out of the British Empire. From where they stood, Clausewitz, a lidless Prussian eye wreathed in flames, could even be the original model for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sauron (Tolkien fought at the Somme).
But Britain, as Orwell points out, was saturated in Liddell Hart thought. And how did this mindset work in practice?
Miserably.
Churchill’s obsession with striking on the periphery following Liddell Hart’s indirect prescription and “the British Way of Warfare” condemned British soldiers to slaughter in small, inconsequential driblets like Greece, Dieppe, or the Dodecanese. While this may be more emotionally tolerable to the large consequential massacres of World War I, it doesn’t bring you any closer to the Ruhr and so it doesn’t bring you any closer to victory.
The British Army didn’t display much flair for the indirect approach either. The most successful British-only operation of the European theater, El Alamein, was a methodical set-piece battle focused more on boring attrition than splendid maneuver. Eighth Army’s pursuit of the remnants of Panzerarmee Afrika afterward was more dogged than dashing. Slim’s 1945 campaign in Burma was an exception to this general mediocrity but then Slim was exceptional among British commanders in not being a mediocre general. When the British Army really tried something like the indirect approach, the result was usually more Arnhem than Mandalay. A British general could be adequate when you drew a line on a map and ordered them to hold it. Scenarios that relied on maneuver and initiative were doomed.
Material trumps spirit. Material wedded to spirit trumps spirit doubly. The Huns and Japanese emphasized fighting spirit to make up for deficiencies in material. They portrayed Americans as soft paper tigers who relied on fighting the Materialschlacht (battle of material). Yet this propaganda was simplistic, as befitting a Fascist regime. America effectively wed narrative to mass in World War II. FDR, for all his flaws, was a great showman. He peddled an American story that sold well at home, at the front, and overseas.
If FDR had relied on rhetoric or clever indirect approaches alone, as Churchill advocated, the Russians would have ended up in Paris. War is more than shock and awe and the sowing of confusion and disorder in enemy ranks. It is more than a gentle wooing of enemy populations with compelling stories. Confusion wears off and love is fickle but death (from a strictly military perspective) is forever. A critical part of war is making the other fellow die for his country, tribe, or non-state actors guild or, at least, persuasively convincing him that there’s a strong possibility thereof.
If you ignore the physical forces in war, you get the opening phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom. If you ignore the moral forces in war, you get Vietnam. In Vietnam, the U.S. Army killed Vietnamese a plenty but lost the contest of moral forces (the North Vietnamese had the good sense to liquidate their media lackeys and hippies when they got uppity). In the opening phase of OIF, there was a lot of emphasis on psychological effect but not enough emphasis put on physically locking down Iraqi forces. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a master of shock, speed, and maneuver, had two parts to his strategy. A Churchillian war of eloquence may deliver the first part, put the scare into ’em, but it may fail to deliver the second: and keep it on. Iraqi forces certainly fled and eventually disappeared but no control was exercised over these wandering soldiers. They were allowed to wander off. Large parts of the country were left un-Americaned for too long. The scare was put into them but it wasn’t kept on. Eventually shock and awe, however much there really was, wore off and it was open season on American soldiers. Contrast this with Germany and Japan after World War II. The scare was put on and if it wore off, there were still American troops with guns patrolling the streets to put it back on. And, if the Americans annoyed you, they could always go home and leave you to the tender mercies of the Russians.
The implicit threat of Muscovite hordes may have done more to keep the fear on the Germans and Japanese than anything the Americans did. After all, the Russians had the most effective mix of narrative and mass of the second World War. Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism had the strategic advantage of integrating Clausewitz at its inception. This helped Stalin demonstrate a masterful grasp of mixing politicking and warfare under the direction of politics. If people thought Americans could be bled into disengagement, they were under no illusions that they could do the same to the Russians. If the Russians came, they would break you. They had the narrative of communism to inspire fellow travelers and useful idiots (the first to go into the GULAG when Soviet troops actually arrived) and they had a well-earned reputation for brutality to inspire everyone else. This narrative was backed by masses of tanks, artillery, planes, trains, automobiles, millions of Russian soldiers, and generals who weren’t afraid to use them to the last man.
If today’s Americans need a Churchill to seek strategic inspiration from, especially in wedding story with mass, they’ll have more luck with John Churchill than his loquacious great-great-great-great grandson.
Posted in faux, fiction, fog of war, framing | 3 Comments »
On sovereignty by motorbike
Sunday, March 2nd, 2014
[ by Charles Cameron — so if they ride through Zürich, do they get to keep all the banks? ]
Matthew Burton asked an intriguing question on Twitter today [upper panel, below] — while 5,000 Russians pose a similar question [lower panel]:
When was the last time sovereignty depended on bike club membership?
Matthew Burton kindly pointed me to this WaPo piece, Obama speaks with Putin by phone, calls on Russia to pull forces back to Crimea bases, which includes the following wording:
“In the case of any further spread of violence to Eastern Ukraine and Crimea,” a statement issued by Putin’s office said, “Russia retains the right to protect its interests and the Russian-speaking population of those areas.”
Posted in Charles Cameron, Doublequotes, gangs, russia, Specs, ukraine, Uncategorized | Comments Off on On sovereignty by motorbike
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Home » C-Suite, Stocks
Gwyneth Yeo Posted On October 15, 2018
Source: VIC
Sean Seah is no stranger to the investing community in Singapore. The 37 year old is the founder of Value Investing College, a leading value investing focused education provider, and has given investing talks in Singapore and around the region.
However, Sean was not always an investor, much less a value investor. ZUU online spoke with the value investing educator to learn how he embarked on his value investing journey.
Growing roots as an investor
Trained in finance and economics in university, Sean’s earliest mindset about investing was that it was a loss-making proposition. “My finance professor told us that statistically, most people cannot beat the market when they invest. It was imprinted in my mind, so I didn’t dare to invest,” said Sean.
His mindset was challenged when he started working in the military and one of his colleagues started talking about his stock investing experience. “I challenged him, saying that most people don’t beat the market, and I had the statistics to prove it, based on my own research,” he said at the time. But his friend was unfazed and showed Sean his trading account, which had nearly $250,000 in trading profits.
Intrigued by his colleague’s success, Sean decided to try and start trading on his own. He quickly lost $60,000, monies pooled from his and his friends’ savings.
“A lot of people treat the stock market like a legalized gambling den, guessing if prices are going to go up or down, and unfortunately I started the same way. I couldn’t quite distinguish between real investing and gambling,” he told ZUU online.
He was later introduced to the concept of value investing through a book written by Mary Buffett. “After reading, I realized you’re not supposed to guess whether the stock price is going up or down. You’re supposed to look at the company behind the stocks, what company you are buying and whether you want to become the owner of the company.”
“It’s a very fundamental approach and it sounds very boring on the surface, but beneath it, that is where the real money is.” Sean pointed out that much of the wealth of many rich billionaires on the Forbes Rich Lists come from their shareholdings in companies that are growing and making money.
“You don’t even need to really monitor the share price. Because as the company grows from making $1 million to making $100 million, they will give you dividends and the worth of their shares that you are holding on will also grow. That’s the idea. That’s how many people became rich.”
Learn how to be a value investor today.
An accidental teacher & business owner
Sean admitted that while he enjoyed sharing about his investing insights with others, he never planned to become a value investing trainer. He had been attending a personal development course where he shared about his investment philosophy, and the trainer later approached him to conduct investing classes. Sean decided to take up the offer, and began his career as a value investing trainer.
The idea of creating Value Investing College arose in 2015, when one of Sean’s students approached him to be a business partner to create an investing education school.
“I was intrigued by the idea because he said that we would be able to touch more lives, build something more sustainable. We could train more coaches, inspire more investors, and form a community to do it together.” With that encouragement, Sean rented an office space, hired some staff and then set up the company.
However, when his business partner left after a couple of months, Sean quickly found himself having to do it all alone. “I didn’t really want to continue to run the business, but I had employed my staff and I couldn’t bear the thought of telling them to go home and do something else.”
Incidentally, Sean found it easy to apply what he had learned in investing into his real life venture, and VIC turned profitable, expanding into more than 24 cities within a span of 2 years.
The investing school also upholds the very same passion that inspired Sean to start teaching investing to others. Sean admits that most of his trainers don’t need the money he pays them to teach because they make so much more through their investing. They joined VIC to share their investing ideas and stayed for the investment community that VIC has built up. “This is what VIC stands for.”
How to never lose money in Value Investing
Sean told ZUU online that he is obsessed with Warren Buffett’s number 1 rule, to never lose money. “It’s virtually impossible not to lose money, because when you invest, there is risk,” Sean explained. “The question is how you can reduce the risk to the point that you almost cannot lose money.”
To reduce his investment risks, Sean follows with 3 layers of safety.
“The first layer of safety is to choose a company based on good fundamentals. If a company is good, if it is making money, has a lot of cash and very little debt, the chances of them closing down is very low.”
“The second layer of safety is, to buy the company at a low valuation. If the company’s price is already cheap, even if you lose money, you will lose very little.”
“The third layer is diversification. Even if you find a good company, and it’s at a very low price, you don’t invest everything into the company. You should diversify into at least 20 stocks, or invest a maximum of 5% of your total investible capital into any individual company. If the company really closes down, you lose only 5%. On the other hand, if you buy another stock that gives you dividends, it can easily cover back your losses, and as a whole portfolio, you will have very little risk. Your risk is reduced and you don’t lose money.”
See how diversification and value investing can fit into your investment portfolio.
Using value investing principles to make life decisions
Sean’s value investing principles even spills over to the way he makes at life decisions, regarding his family, his health and even his family car.
“When I make certain decisions, like between attending a business meeting or going to my children’s school recital, I ask myself, which will matter more in 10 years time? Maybe this business meeting will not matter much, but my children will remember that I was there for them, even 10 years later. So I use a long term perspective to make my short term decisions, which is what value investing is about.”
“Even for my health, when I make food choices, or decide whether I should exercise on a weekly basis, I ask myself, how do I want to feel 10 years later, and what should I do today to ensure that 10 years later I can achieve the result that I want. It’s a very fundamental approach.”
Sean also added that he and his spouse are considering upgrading their Honda City sedan for a larger Honda Odyssey to accommodate their family, as COE (Certificate of Entitlement) prices have fallen in recent months. “I don’t need the car to be very fanciful, I just need the car to bring us places. The sedan works for our family of five now, but we need to think about whether the car will continue to serve us in 3 to 5 years, when the children are bigger.”
On the other hand, he is quick to concede that he is not as thrifty as Warren Buffett has been known to be, and is willing to spend money on things that will benefit his family.
“I believe money is a resource and it is meant to be used. I’m not out to be the richest man on earth, I want my money to be a resource for my family. So we go for family holidays, to enjoy ourselves. But everytime we do, I will do my due diligence by getting 3 quotations, shop around for the best deal and make sure that I am paying the right price for it.”
Sean’s best investments
“Most of my best stock picks are situations where I am consumers of their products,” said Sean.
One of his earliest most successful investments was in sportswear company, Nike. “I bought into it in 2005 when it was $30, and sold it when it rose by over 200%. Sadly I sold it too early. If I didn’t do that, I would have made 700% to 800% today.”
Another successful stock investment for Sean was Usana, the health supplements company of whom Sean was an existing customer. “I was taking their health supplements and it was really making me feel healthier.” Usana’s share price took a beating when public opinion turned against another multilevel marketing health company, Herbalife, for being an illegitimate pyramid scheme.
“Whether you like network marketing businesses or not, their business model is excellent,” he observed. “They don’t need big offices or physical shops which involve a lot of cost. They just recruit promoters, and they do their business through network marketing. Every time they go into a new country, they can expand very fast. That’s where I said to myself, I may not like to do network marketing as a promoter, but I would like to be an owner of a network marketing company.” Usana’s share price rose by nearly 4 fold since he purchased its shares in 2011.
A third successful stock pick came from a rather unlikely source. Sean heard about 800super, the Singapore listed waste management company, from a security guard who was making small talk with him at an office lift lobby. “I hadn’t heard of this stock before, but I was intrigued. I realized that they collect rubbish from HDB blocks and housing estates. And I asked myself, 10-15 years later will they still be around? Will they still be making money? The answer was, ‘Yes’. He bought into the company when its share price was at 30 cents. It has since risen to $1.20.
At present, 50% of Sean’s current investment portfolio is in cash, because of the high valuations of the S&P 500 index. “This is a rule I set for myself, I will inject cash into the market when the valuation of the market is low. If the market is expensive, I will take more cash out, because there is a greater likelihood that it will crash.”
This, he says, is part of the major review he does every 7 to 10 years.
For the rest of his portfolio, 30% of his portfolio is invested in Chinese technology companies and Vietnam based companies. The last 20% is invested in dividend stocks in Singapore, Australia and Japan.
Now’s the time to stop speculating and start investing in value.
Debunking Value Investing’s Number 1 Myth
Perhaps the biggest myth Sean has heard over the years, is that it takes a very long time for an investor to start making money. “Value investors always look at the long term perspective, how a company will be in 10 years, so many people have the idea that they will only make money 10 years later,” said Sean. “That’s not true.”
Sadly, this myth is often perpetrated by admirers of the icon of Value Investing, Warren Buffett. “People look at Warren Buffett, who is a billionaire, but who is also over 80 years old. And some think you have to be 80 years old to be rich through value investing.”
“The truth is, though we buy a company that will last at least 10 to 20 years, you will start to receive dividends when the company starts to make money. When their share price starts growing, you will start to make money as well.”
Sean gave a very interesting dating analogy to debunk this myth.
“When deciding which partner or which girl to date, I feel you should date someone who has the potential to become your wife or spouse 10 years later. So you look at the long term perspective. But that doesn’t mean you only enjoy in the long run. Even in short run, when you date a good partner, you can enjoy your time together, go on nice dates together.”
“So this is the way I look at it, you enjoy the benefits in the short run, even though you analyse it in the long run.”
Advice to new investors
As the founder of Value Investing College, Sean’s advice for new investors was surprisingly refreshing.
“I know that the correct thing to say is to read books, go and attend our courses and things like that,” he said laughing. “But I feel that the best way to learn, is to start investing.”
“You can invest with as little as $100 or $200. Once you put real money into the stock market, you become an investor participating in the stock market. When you do that, everything either becomes clearer to you, or even more confusing to you, but at least you get started.”
“That first $100 or $200 in the stock market is not to make you rich, it’s to give you experience and buy you a lesson. I think that is the most important.”
Keen to learn more from Sean and his trainers? Start with the Value Investing College.
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Mt. MitchellTami Luckie2017-06-03T12:43:17+00:00
Mt. Mitchell
Black Mountains
“You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.” The Rolling Stones
Mt. Mitchell is the highest point in North Carolina and east of the Mississippi. I had tried to hike this peak in the first half of 52, but due to severe thunderstorms I could not. For Peak #51, I had intended to hike Clingmans Dome in Tennessee. But another severe storm in Tennessee shut down electricity and the road to the trailhead. A quick decision was made to audible and go for Mitchell instead.
Mount Mitchell is the highest peak of the Appalachian Mountains and the highest peak in mainland eastern North America. It is located near Burnsville in Yancey County, North Carolina, in the Black Mountain subrange of the Appalachians, and about 19 miles (31 km) northeast of Asheville. It is protected by Mount Mitchell State Park and surrounded by the Pisgah National Forest. Mount Mitchell’s elevation is 6,684 feet (2,037 m) above sea level.
The mountain, previously known as Black Dome for its rounded shape, was named after Elisha Mitchell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, who first explored the Black Mountain region in 1835, and determined that the height of the range exceeded by several hundred feet that of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, commonly thought at the time to be the highest point east of the Rocky Mountains. Mitchell fell to his death at nearby Mitchell Falls in 1857, having returned to verify his earlier measurements.
North Carolina is a state in the southeastern region of the United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west, Virginia to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. North Carolina is the 28th most extensive and the 9th most populous of the U.S. states. The state is divided into 100 counties. The capital is Raleigh. The most populous municipality is Charlotte, which is the second largest banking center in the United States after New York City.
Woodland-culture American Indians were in the area around 1000 BCE; starting around 750 CE. By 1550, many groups of American Indians lived in present-day North Carolina, including Chowanoke, Roanoke, Pamlico, Machapunga, Coree, Cape Fear Indians, Waxhaw, Waccamaw, and Catawba.
Juan Pardo explored the area in 1566–1567, establishing Fort San Juan in 1567 at the site of the Native American community of Joara, a Mississippian culture regional chiefdom in the western interior, near the present-day city of Morganton. The fort lasted only 18 months; the local inhabitants killed all but one of the 120 men Pardo had stationed at a total of six forts in the area. A later expedition by Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe followed in 1584, at the direction of Sir Walter Raleigh.
In June 1718, the pirate Blackbeard ran his flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, aground at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, in present-day Carteret County. After the grounding her crew and supplies were transferred to smaller ships. In November, after appealing to the governor of North Carolina, who promised safe-haven and a pardon, Blackbeard was killed in an ambush by troops from Virginia. In 1996 Intersal, Inc., a private firm, discovered the remains of a vessel likely to be the Queen Anne’s Revenge, which was added to the US National Register of Historic Places.
North Carolina became one of the English Thirteen Colonies and with the territory of South Carolina was originally known as the Province of Carolina. The northern and southern parts of the original province separated in 1729. Originally settled by small farmers, sometimes having a few slaves, who were oriented toward subsistence agriculture, the colony lacked cities or towns. Pirates menaced the coastal settlements, but by 1718 the pirates had been captured and killed. Growth was strong in the middle of the 18th century, as the economy attracted Scots-Irish, Quaker, English and German immigrants. The colonists generally supported the American Revolution, as the number of Loyalists was smaller than in some other colonies.
On May 20, 1861, North Carolina was the last of the Confederate states to declare secession from the Union, 13 days after the Tennessee legislature voted for secession. Some 125,000 North Carolinians served in the military; 20,000 were killed in battle, the most of any state in the Confederacy, and 21,000 died of disease. The state government was reluctant to support the demands of the national government in Richmond, and the state was the scene of only small battles.
Summit: May 28th
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
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All Events in Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (15)
February 16Thursday
Works & Process at the Guggenheim announces the World Premiere of Works & Process Rotunda Project: Michelle Dorrance
February 16, 2017 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum On Thursday, February 16, 2017 at 6:30pm, 8pm and 9:30pm, Works & Process presents the first Works & Process Rotunda Project, a new initiative, commissioning site-specific residencies and per… Organized by Michelle Tabnick Communications | Type: dance, performance
Works & Process at the Guggenheim announces the World Premiere of Works & Process Rotunda Project: Michelle Dorrance with Nicholas Van Young
February 17Friday
Gallery Reading: Ken Liu at the Guggenheim Museum
February 17, 2017 from 12pm to 1pm – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum In this daytime gallery program, author Ken Liu reads from his commissioned short story, “A Brief and Inaccurate but True Account of the Origin of Living Books,” from the Tales of Our Time exhibition… Organized by Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | Type: literary, reading
February 27Monday
Works & Process at the Guggenheim announces Playwrights Horizons: The Profane by Zayd Dohrn
February 27, 2017 from 7:30pm to 9:30pm – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum On Monday, February 27, 2017 at 7:30pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents a discussion with playwright Zayd Dohrn and director Kip Fagan on the creation of The Profane. Members of the ca… Organized by Michelle Tabnick Communications | Type: theater
March 5Sunday
Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents Come From Away on Broadway
March 5, 2017 from 7:30pm to 9:30pm – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum On Sunday, March 5, 2017 at 7:30pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents a discussion with Canadian writer duo Irene Sankoff and David Hein, Tony-nominated choreographer Kelly Devine, and T… Organized by Michelle Tabnick Communications | Type: theater, preview, discussion
March 6Monday
Works & Process at the Guggenheim announces Lincoln Center Theater: Oslo with J.T. Rogers and Bartlett Sher
March 6, 2017 from 7:30pm to 9:30pm – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum On Monday, March 6, 2017 at 7:30pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents a discussion with Oslo playwright J.T. Rogers and director Bartlett Sher prior to the Broadway premiere of what has… Organized by Michelle Tabnick Communications | Type: theater, preview, discussion
April 9Sunday
Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents Santa Fe Opera: The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs
April 9, 2017 at 7:30pm to April 10, 2017 at 7:30pm – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum On Sunday and Monday, April 9 and 10, 2017 at 7:30pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents performance highlights and moderated discussion with Grammy-nominated American Composer Mason Bate… Organized by Michelle Tabnick Communications | Type: opera
The Hugo Boss Prize 2016: Anicka Yi, Life Is Cheap
April 21, 2017 to July 5, 2017 – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Anicka Yi is the recipient of the 2016 Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial award for contemporary art that for over 20 years has recognized some of the most powerful and singular voices in the field. Yi cata… Organized by a4 - Network Admin | Type: art, exhibition
April 23Sunday
Works & Process presents New York City Ballet: Music at the Ballet with Andrew Litton
April 23, 2017 from 7:30pm to 9:30pm – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum On Sunday, April 23, 2017 at 7:30pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents New York City Ballet’s Music Director Andrew Litton, a longtime conductor of symphony orchestras around the world w… Organized by Michelle Tabnick Communications | Type: dance, performance
Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents American Ballet Theatre: Whipped Cream by Alexei Ratmansky
April 30, 2017 at 7:30pm to May 1, 2017 at 10pm – Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum On Sunday and Monday, April 30 and May 1, 2017 at 7:30pm, Works & Process at the Guggenheim presents performance highlights and discussion on American Ballet Theatre’s newest production, Whipped… Organized by Michelle Tabnick Communications | Type: dance, performance
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Συνεννόηση για Δράση - Απόψεις
Τρίτη, 24 Μάρτιος 2015 15:44
“The International Criminal Court (ICC), governed by the Rome Statute, is the first permanent, treaty based, international criminal court established to help end impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern to the international community.
The ICC is an independent international organization, and is not part of the United Nations system. Its seat is at The Hague in the Netherlands. Although the Court’s expenses are funded primarily by States Parties, it also receives voluntary contributions from governments, international organizations, individuals, corporations and other entities.
The international community has long aspired to the creation of a permanent international court, and, in the 20th century, it reached consensus on definitions of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials addressed war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity committed during the Second World War.
In the 1990s after the end of the Cold War, tribunals like the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda were the result of consensus that impunity is unacceptable. However, because they were established to try crimes committed only within a specific time-frame and during a specific conflict, there was general agreement that an independent, permanent criminal court was needed.
On 17 July 1998, the international community reached an historic milestone when 120 States adopted the Rome Statute, the legal basis for establishing the permanent International Criminal Court.
The Rome Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002 after ratification by 60 countries.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is an independent, permanent court that tries persons accused of the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The ICC is based on a treaty, joined by 122 countries (effective as of 1 May 2013).
The ICC is a court of last resort. It will not act if a case is investigated or prosecuted by a national judicial system unless the national proceedings are not genuine, for example if formal proceedings were undertaken solely to shield a person from criminal responsibility. In addition, the ICC only tries those accused of the gravest crimes.
In all of its activities, the ICC observes the highest standards of fairness and due process. The jurisdiction and functioning of the ICC are governed by the Rome Statute”.
[www.icc-cpi.int]
Currently, our total International community is being horribly devastated by underlined and/or covert violence. At the same time, our human kind as a whole, stares all this misery, passively and not really knowing how to defect towards peace, freedom, friendship, rationality, sanity and frugal prosperity.
Our International community, seems to me that, is painfully stalling due to hers false believes with regard to the alleged effectiveness of the collective organizations, namely, of the International Foundations.
For example, The International Criminal Court (ICC) is being staffed by discrete, innocent and mortal human beings. Is there anyone who might believe that those people could ever confront, against unimaginable methods of cruelty, virulence and domination, the current tidal wave of globalized greed and globalized lack of conscientiousness? Is there anyone who might believe that ICC could ever defeat the atrocious international crimes' “laundry” methods (secret and/or false trials, forced memory erasing, forced debilitation and forced sudden deaths against victims and witnesses of international crimes)?
Why, all those perpetual international cruelty is being manifested?
This issue seems like being multidimensional and the answer to the above question should disclose more than one, interwoven causes. But still and according to my opinion, by far, the most important cause of the international cruelty of all kinds, probably, is “the quest for perpetual cash flows of commercial profits”.
It seems like being a part of deepest human nature that:
Everyone shares an inner tendency for not getting bothered for someone else unless that someone else is, potentially, lucrative.
If someone else does not worth getting bothered for, then, that someone else is not worth becoming exploited.
If someone else does not worth becoming (too much...) exploited, then, that someone else is a potential (true...) friend.
According to my opinion, the most obvious thing within our world is that, tomorrow morning, the Sun is going to rise, from the East. And the second most obvious thing, may be, the practical ways for our Nations to peacefully and safely defect towards peace, freedom, friendship and frugal prosperity...
P.S.: Putting away innocent victims and innocent bystanders of the cruelty of our world, is a choice which, instead of offering any sustainable benefit of any kind, shall surely diminish our collective moral capital. And by this way, our propensity towards local and global positions of equilibrium is going to drastically become degraded.
Note: the photo was found here.
Τελευταία Ενημέρωση στις Τετάρτη, 25 Μάρτιος 2015 14:25
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Thanks Dave
May 20, 2015 / Aye Pancakes / Comments Off on Thanks Dave
I can’t remember how I first learned that David Letterman existed. It was in the 70’s for sure, because I remember being excited for summer holidays 1980 to begin so I could watch his short-lived morning TV show. It was the summer between 10th and 11th grades, and the school year ended early due to a teacher’s strike. Bonus.
At the end of one episode, there was a birthday cake covered in candles, and then a bunch of confetti was dropped. The confetti caught fire, and the credits rolled over a chaotic scene of flames, extinguishers, and people rushing around looking panicked while Dave just stood in the middle of it all with a slightly bemused look on his face.
I was in love.
It was a bummer when that show got gassed, but because I already new what to look forward to, it made the prospect of his new nighttime show announced a year or two later so tantalizing. I was already a Carson fan, so having Dave follow him was a can’t-miss TV appointment for me. I didn’t miss a single episode for at least 4 years. I saw the very first Top 10 list. The very first Stupid Pet Trick. The very first watermelon being thrown off the roof.
Marc Maron calls them “cranks”. Curmudgeons who are so smart and funny that you can’t help but love them despite their perpetual “get off my lawn” disposition. Fictional people like Bill McNeal from NewsRadio, Gregory House, and Roseanne. Real people like Lewis Black, Eric Cartman and Letterman. It’s a hard thing to pull off, because they’re walking a knife’s edge between being funny and being bitchy. It takes a special type, and I’ve always loved that type. I suppose I’ve tried to mimic it with varying degrees of success failure. There are days where I have to remind myself that life isn’t a TV show and I can’t say certain things. Too often, I say those things anyway. Que Sera, Sera.
Anyway…I kind of fell out of being a regular Late Night and Late Show viewer. Other things in my life became more important, but I still usually managed to catch a couple of shows a week. Once a fan, always a fan.
As I finish up writing this post, we’re a half-hour away from the final show starting. Dave’s been part of my life for at least 35 years. He unknowingly taught me things and influenced me, as he did with millions of others.
I don’t think I’m emotionally prepared for tonight. I’m gonna miss Dave being part of my cultural landscape. This one hurts a bit.
Aye Pancakes Reporting Live from My Recliner
Andy’s Guest Post
Local Facebook User Can’t Believe Leonardo DiCaprio Hasn’t Thoroughly Researched Arcane Weather Phenomena
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Best Practices for Permissions
Many independent publishers give published material away for nothing if it meets a more or less arbitrary benchmark they have set for fair use and therefore, in their view, does not require permission or a fee. This finding comes from an admittedly unscientific survey of the published permissions policies of a couple of dozen publishers. They set the mark at 500 or 400 or 300 or 250 words, and so on down the scale. One publisher’s policy was to make an entire chapter free, regardless of how many words it contained.
In my view, all these publishers are misguided, and for two primary reasons.
First, US copyright law does not establish a bright-line test for what does or does not qualify as a fair use. Each case is decided on its own unique facts, taking into consideration the four factors set forth in the part of the copyright statute that deals with fair use, Section 107.
Those four factors are:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
the nature of the copyrighted work
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrightedwork as a whole
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
(For more about fair use, see “Fair Use and Other Aspects of Coping with Copyright Law,” June 2011.)
Second, it seems foolish to focus on how much of your publishing assets the public may take without asking—especially since the answer isn’t clear from settled law—when you could be focusing on the fact that someone is interested in some of those assets and figuring out how to maximize their value.
Payoffs for Better Permissions Policy
Instead of treating permissions requests as a burden to be avoided when possible, consider building a robust permissions and licensing program that will not only be good for your bottom line, but that will also strengthen your copyright portfolio.
More specifically, a well-conceived permissions and licensing program will:
Generate another revenue stream with little additional cost. There is no cost of goods sold and little direct cost or overhead associated with an efficient permissions program. Think of it as a way of squeezing additional revenue out of already acquired assets.
Aid in the promotion of your core product. Extracts from your published works reproduced in other products sold by other publishers can serve as teasers and create a pull-through demand for full copies of the source material.
Create evidence of a market for licenses and permissions. The fourth fair use factor concerns the impact of a use on the potential market for your work. You will be better able to overcome a fair use defense by an unlicensed user of your material if you have evidence, in the form of a robust permissions program, that you are in the business of selling license and reprint rights, so that uses without your consent deprive you of the revenue these sales would otherwise generate.
Create evidence of a lawful alternative. You will also be better able to overcome a fair use defense if you have evidence that you have made an accessible alternative to reliance on fair use available at a reasonable cost. At least one U.S. appellate court has said that a copyright owner’s claim of displaced licensing revenue will not carry much weight if the unlicensed user has filled a market niche that the copyright owner simply had no interest in occupying (with lack of interest evidenced by a lack of licensing or permissions activity).
Create evidence of a market price for damages calculations. Your claim to have been financially damaged by an infringer who has used a portion of work you published without a license or consent will be speculative unless you can produce evidence of the value of the license “displaced.” One good way to do this is with reference to a history of licenses actually granted.
Specific Suggestions
First and foremost, promote your permissions services.
Include information about your policy on your Web site and make it easy for people to submit requests online. Also describe your permissions policy in your catalog, and include a permissions request form or request-for-quote form that customers can fill out and fax or email.
Include a statement about permissions on the copyright page of each of your books directing readers to your Web site, your catalog, or your permissions person or department via a phone number and/or an email address.
Grant rights only as they will be exploited, one edition of the work at a time.
Insist that each requestor identify the work in which your excerpt will be used by title, by edition, by language, and by form/medium (hardcover, softcover, mass market, e-book format, etc.).
Ask the requestor to tell you the price, the size of the first print run, and the projected life-of-edition sales of the work in which your excerpt will be used. This information will help you establish an appropriate fee for the requested grant. (See below for ideas on how to set the fee.)
Make your grant of permission in writing on a form developed by you, and make it contingent on compliance with the following conditions:
The grant of permission should extend to only one edition of the new work and should not extend to use in any other edition, revision, version, or translation.
The grant of permission should exclude any quotations or illustrations identified in the selection as having been reprinted by permission of a third party.
The selection should be faithfully reproduced and should not be changed, added to, or deleted from except with your prior approval.
Each copy of the new work should include a notice of copyright, printed in proximity to the selection or on a separate acknowledgment page, in the following form: Copyright © 20__ by [your company name, or your author’s if the author holds the copyrights]. Reprinted by permission of [your company name and contact info].
The permissions fee should be paid upon publication or within six months of the date of this grant of permission, whichever first occurs.
Upon publication, requestor should provide you with two complimentary copies of the new work (one copy so that you will know when the new work has been published and can check that a proper credit line was included; and one copy to send to your author, because authors are flattered to know when they’ve been quoted).
The grant should expire automatically seven (or fewer, as you prefer) years from the date of publication of the new work, or if it isn’t published within two years of the date of your grant, or if (once published) it is allowed to remain out of print for six consecutive months.
In addition, make sure that the publishing contract you use with your authors has language adequate in the age of e-books to distinguish the permissions and subrights licensing revenue streams from the e-book revenues (for more about this, see “Contract Updates for the E-Book Era,” August 2010).
Each book, and each extract from it, has a unique value, both in the marketplace and in the context in which it is proposed to be used.
By definition, the work has been published, so it has already passed muster in your eyes as a publishable work. Moreover, the requestor has sought to reproduce a portion of it rather than write new copy, presumably because of who said it or how well it was said. So there’s really no reason to set your fee at less than the $1 to $2 per word that people would probably have to pay for commissioned, publishable work.
You should take into account how substantial an extract it is—not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively. Is it the kernel of Gerald Ford’s rationale for pardoning Richard Nixon, or is it two paragraphs of a historian’s garden-variety account of an event that a dozen other sources describe too?
Factor in the commercial value and popularity of the book from which the material is to be taken as well as the projected value and success of the work in which its use is proposed, and fit all this into the pattern of other permissions you have priced.
At the end of the day, the value of the rights requested is what a willing seller and a willing buyer can agree to. But the value of a well-designed and -executed permissions program will be greater than the revenue it drops to your bottom line; it will also enhance the value and enforceability of your entire collection of copyrighted material.
Steve Gillen is a lawyer and partner in the intellectual property firm of Wood Herron & Evans and has focused his practice on publishing and media matters for 30 years. He is a member of IBPA and a frequent contributor to the Independent. For more information: sgillen@whepatent.com; 513/241-2324.
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HomeUncategorizedThe most popular sky sports news girls
The most popular sky sports news girls
Sky Sports news is one of the leading 24 hours sports news channels in UK and Ireland. Launched in October 1998, they’ve already come a long way now. Operated by Sky Sports, this channel is known to provide entertaining and informative news from the arena of sport.
Aside from the content of the show, what also holds the viewers attention are definitely the Sky Sports News girls. Beautiful, attractive, confident, intelligent and well informed these are a few adjectives that can be used to explain the female news presenters of Sky Sports News.
Amongst the most popular Sky Sports News girls are Georgie Thompson, Millie Clode, Vicky Gomershall and Alex Hammond. Amongst all of them it’s been Georgie Thompson who has been the most famous and successful. Currently residing in the Upminister region of Essex, she’s been working together with Sky Sports since 2001. She has a keen understanding of sports and also the viewers as well. Georgie Thompson has been in charge of covering some major sports activities such as Grand Prix Masters, A1Grand Prix, and Race of the Champions, Speedway World Cup and the US Open as well. A sports woman herself, Georgie Thompson has taken part in several international junior tennis championships during her childhood in Queenswood Boarding School.
Georgie Thompsn considers the legendary David Frost her mentor. She co-hosted the program “Greatest Sporting legends” with David Frost that ran for duration of 8 weeks and culminated in the crowing of Mohammad Ali. It came as no great surprise when she was named one of the top one hundred Sexiest Women In the World by the British mens magazine, FHM.
One of the latest Sky Sports News presenters is Millie Clode. Drop dead georgeous looks and a winning attitude took this girl from being a quiz show host to a television news presenter too. Ranked first in the Top 10 TV Sports Babes by The Sun, Millie Clode has been with Sky Sports News since January 2006. Even though she was hired by Sky Sports News, she did not continue to turn into a presenter with immediate effect. She had to first spend a couple of months understanding the dynamics of the news channel.
Vicky Gomershall joined the Sky Sports News team in 2005. She’d started out a reporter covering events around the North West and finally migrated to becoming a presenter. A self confessed football fan, she actually is a Cheltenham Town follower. Apart from football, cricket is also listed amongst her favorite sports. She’s also said to enjoy athletics and has run for Cheltenham back then when her hero was Daly Thompson. In her earlier years Vicky Gomershall played with the Fulham Ladies and still keeps that interest alive by playing 5-a-side-football.
Alex Hammond has been a part of Sky Sports News fraternity since 2003. She has joined the group as a racing expert and went on to becoming the presenter of Good Morning Sports Fans. She has interviewed several top racing names such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Mick Channon, Sir Bobby Robson, A.P. McCoy, Pat Eddery amongst a great many others.
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You are at:Home»Missiology»Culture»Rediscovering the Revelational Church
Rediscovering the Revelational Church
By Basil Grafas on August 23, 2011 Culture, Missiology
This is a long article, to fit your needs, it is downloadable as a PDf as well: Rediscovering the Revelational Church:PDF
Introduction: The World in Search of Identity
The following is a brief ecclesiological statement intended to serve as the basis for both a more comprehensive ecclesiology and as the positive response to sub-ecclesial missiology popular in this day. Such projects are, to be sure, overdue, but are also beyond the scope of this effort. It is born of recent, unprecedented growth within international Presbyterianism and the conviction that a firm understanding of one’s true identity in Christ is the best foundation for present and future ministry. Its contents reflect interaction with four ideas, the name “International Presbyterian Church”*, the ecclesiology of the Book of Revelation, the heritage of the historical church and the explosive growth of Christianity in Asia and Africa. I also hope that it will generate much debate and development within reformed churches as they consider both eternal verities and a changing world.
Every theology is a reflection of the tension between the centripetal force exerted by the specific context framing its creation and the centrifugal desire to produce something that transcends local circumstances. This attempt at an ecclesiology is no exception. Early 21st century Europe and America are experiencing waves of change that force societies to confront or adapt, discover or defend. Perhaps nothing so typifies the age as the intense attempt to understand itself.
The challenge of identity for the world: Is this world characterized more by a relentless globalization that creates at least a hybridization of culture or is it in danger of fracturing into a myriad parochialism? When the Wall came down and the “Evil Empire” crumbled, the expectation was that a qualitative barrier had been surmounted. History as a period of fundamental threat and uncertainty was said to be at an end, at least according to Fukuyama.[i] No longer would the world be torn between competing nuclear-powered behemoths. We had grown beyond it.
9/11 and the chaotic, disenfranchised world it illuminated placed the prevailing confidence in question, much as World War One had wrecked postmillennial optimism. What once was seen as hope in progress began to resemble hubris. Like the earlier Roman Mediterranean, the new world is characterized by a rapidly expanding cosmopolitanism. By the first decade of the 21st century, 140 million people were living outside of their birth countries. As millions of migrants crisscrossed the planet, their new communities occasionally assimilated, sometimes retrenched themselves and usually evolved into hybrid cultures, at once familiar and foreign.
What then is a European, an Asian or an American? Better yet, who am I? When I am free to be myself, what self would that be? Is my identity found in myself or in my being part of something bigger and perhaps more enduring? In an endlessly customizable reality, it is hard to pin down definitions and identities. What does freedom mean? Am I free when no one puts me in a box or am I really free when the barriers that separate me from others are removed? Where is my wholeness (shalom) found? Is our world marred by Huntington’s idea of civilizational conflict or is the fragmentation even closer to the bone?[ii] Scholars of Islamism such as Olivier Roy note that Muslim tensions are often with itself and its home cultures more than they are between Islam and others. The Taliban for example opposed not the West so much as traditional Afghan culture, such as the playing of traditional music or flying of kites.[iii]
When it is all said and done, we are left with the gnawing need for a sense of wholeness and settledness. It seems that for much of the world, modernity has led to an irreducible poverty of soul and a sense of lostness amid license. Will we find definition and home in something to believe? Will resurgent religion reassert itself into the driver’s seat or will the answer ultimately be more personal? Is the answer located in something we believe, something we do, or someone with whom we can identify? In other words, is resolution to be found in the intellectual or the relational?
The challenge for the church: Much of the Western church seems to be roiling with the struggle for identity. In a sense, it appears as though we the church are always trying to catch up with a world rapidly rotating on its axis. We have, particularly in the late 20th century, focused on the incarnational dimensions of the gospel. I remember Steve Brown once talking about a couple. Apparently the young wife had been required to have facial surgery. Unfortunately, the operation went horribly wrong. The surgeon accidentally cut a nerve that forced her face into a permanently disfiguring grin. She agonized over the mutilation. Her husband, as Brown tells it, demonstrated his love for her in twisting his own mouth as he kissed her so that their lips would meet. Just as the husband loves his wife, so God loves his people by sending the gospel of Christ into every culture and human circumstance. God twists his own lips to kiss our distorted humanity. It means that God can enter every culture. Kenyans and Balinese can have just as much access as anyone to the Son of God. Moderns, postmoderns, and premoderns all can worship King Jesus without having to leave their own culture and enter another. We do not have to be slaves to outmoded cultural worship artifacts. We can have our needs met.
There is a trap, however, the customization trap. If the gospel is ultimately translatable and the gospel form is ultimately customizable, where does that take humanity, not just individuals, but the collective whole? Where do you stop? What prevents adaptability from descending into disintegration? I think that incarnational thinking, without modification, can drive towards several ends, all sad. The evangelical church has in my lifetime (I am in my 50s) embraced a strong conversionism that valued and focused on the primacy of seeing individuals come to Christ. The making of decisions became the principle aim of both active believers and of evangelical churches. In a sense, it equated the Church itself with saved individuals. At its best, this thinking ensured that the Church was never smaller than the individual. On the other hand, it almost guaranteed that the Church would never be anything more than that. The problems did not go unnoticed.
Evangelism and missions underwent tremendous changes in the late 20th century to redress many of these issues. Much of the change was stimulated by developments in the evangelical academic community. Mark Noll and George Marsden focused a great deal on both the inadequacies of evangelical scholarship and large-scale changes to address the problems.[iv] One of the most significant changes in the evangelical community was the growing prominence of sociology and anthropology as interpreters of culture and advisors in ministry. American cultural observers of the church such as George Barna and Wade Clark Roof, not only surveyed public opinion and described the contemporary church, but also began to be insinuated into the process of deciding what church should be.[v] The same could be said for the mission field. Anthropologists such as Charles Kraft now drive missions’ focus and behavior.[vi]
As Harvie Conn used to point out, theology was once arrogant and ignored culture altogether. He championed the principled integration of anthropological and sociological insight into ministry.[vii] Missionaries and church growth theorists listened. There in lies the rub. What happens when anthropology ceases simply to inform? What if it becomes the principle basis for ministry or at least the arbiter of its expression? In an age in which propositional content becomes less certain and dependable, “customer satisfaction” or cultural accommodation becomes a value in itself that drives total processes. What is important is what works best. Social sciences recognize no other criteria. Wade Clark Roof, in fact, likens theologies and traditions as tools in a toolkit that can be used to assemble a church.[viii] Pick the right parts, use the right tools and an effective church results. But what defines “works” or for that matter “best”? Can the social sciences bear that weight of responsibility? It seems to me that evidence indicates otherwise.
Despite its own perceived credibility problems and potential misuse, biblically-based theology must remain central to the process of defining and discovering identity, whether of persons or of the church. We must assert this first because such is generally not the case in contemporary evangelicalism. Theology is the token presence, validating ministry applications for the picky, but contributing little of substance to the discussions. Nevertheless, questions persist that cry out for biblically and theologically-informed perspectives.
Think about what was said concerning the incarnational focus of modern missiology and church growth methodology. There is an imbalance inherent in focusing exclusively on the incarnation, kenosis and the like. It is possible to see the Church, following an undiluted incarnational concentration, descend into an unbiblical and destructive tribalism. What of the Church’s catholicity? Is the church universal only in heaven? If it is to be visibly universal as well as incarnational, how does one manifest these truths? Once again, who decides?
What about the position of the church with regard to the world? Does it approach the world on the basis of their common humanity or does it confront the world on the basis of its alignment with Christ, not just Adam? Is it to be bridge-builder or a prophet? Who chooses? What informs the choice? If we answer “us” and we are all in some way unique, will not these decisions lead to the inevitable disintegration of the church as we identify ourselves fundamental as individual parts of our own cultures? If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as citizens of heaven, will we not either craft churches as fortified castles or as alien spacecraft?
How should the church respond to the fallenness of creation? Should it take is cue from contemporary Western values and identify itself with the winners of the world, the Lord himself promising that everything we ask or imagine to be fulfilled? Would not triumphalism and prosperity best evoke the resurrection and victory of the Lord? On the other hand, can there be identification with the resurrection without going by way of the cross? If we live between the crucifixion and the new heavens and new earth, what should we look like? Moreover, while we are here, are we most appropriately in the world, of the world, or being used by God to transform the world? Are we then more than conquerors or strangers in a strange land? What is our task between the earthly and heavenly cities? Are we to “win” souls at the expense of losing the world? What value does the physical and temporal have? What of politics, justice, and the environment?
Where can we find the answers? The default answer is, of course, consult the Bible, but this is an authority to which everyone appeals, both saints and heretics. In an age of parody, anything is fodder for clever distortion. More important, who makes these decisions? To be sure, any believer is never alone with the Bible. There must always be a triunity of believer, book and Spirit. But isn’t this true in every other age? We must always remember that it was Arius and not Athanasius that appealed to the pristine, exclusive reliance on Scripture. While waiting for a fresh exclusive word from the Lord are we not also reveling in our own hubris? Aren’t we just affirming a sanctified form of self-reliance? Must we remain spiritual teenagers, always asserting our excellence over the wisdom of our parents?
The cost of an identity crisis
There is a price for our confusion. We no longer are sure of whom we really are. “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the church faces an identity crisis unparalleled in its history.”[ix] What is a Christian? Twentieth century Protestantism seemed divided in its response. Some see the identity in historic continuity with older churches that emerged from the Reformation period, even when many of these fundamentally denied their own heritage. Theirs is an identity of community based on forms and repeated practices. All that is missing are the founders’ theology, biblical formation, and perhaps the Holy Spirit. Mainline denominations became associated with the worst excesses of modernism and liberalism. The problem for these bodies stemmed from their drift during the Enlightenment to rationalism and a poverty of spirituality.
Twentieth century evangelicalism sought alternatives that would bring the church back to biblically centred identity, primarily in the experience of the new birth, revivalism, and the restated authority of Scripture. The earliest part of the twentieth century witnessed the strength of fundamentalism, particularly in the USA. The perceived anti-intellectualism of fundamentalism however compelled evangelicals to pursue self-expressions that were less negative, more engaging of popular culture and engaging with contemporary standards of scholarship. The lion’s share of development within evangelicalism, again particularly in the USA was promoted outside of traditional church structures and hierarchies. Parachurch agencies and higher-quality academic institutions with no direct denominational control proliferated. These contributed enormously to world evangelization. Once again, however, everything comes with a price.
While evangelical identity was once generally located within the heritage of established churches emerging out of the Reformation, themselves reflecting a sense of continuity with the “Grand Tradition”, the mainstream Christian world dating back to the early church, it now reflected its broadened interaction with civilizational trends, secular thought, and streams of Christian expression outside the mainstream of received tradition. Fundamentalism’s understanding of Scripture was challenged as modernist and reductionist, opening the possibilities both to a more nuanced treatment conversant in ancient forms of writing and also open to critical treatment in a manner once taught exclusively by liberal non-evangelical theologians. In other words, evangelical practices and definitions of the fundamentals of the faith were being stretched as ideas once held to be antithetical to evangelical faith were now embraced as but mere tools in the toolbox of discerning evangelical thinkers. Systematic theology, a counterweight to the influence of the social sciences declined, fell under suspicion as being just another outdated manifestation of modernism, an unbiblical accretion layered unnecessarily on top of the Hebrew and Greek standard. Its removal from a strong position of influence opened the field to dominance by social sciences, and biblical studies shorn of any integrating mechanism such as would have been supplied by theology, whether biblical or systematic. Evangelical scholars soon began to identify with the disciplines of study cultivated in the academy; with liberal or conservative labels rendered obsolete. The extra-ecclesial organizations established by evangelicals to speed the spread of a historically framed, church-centered gospel became conduits for change that sped the evangelical consensus away from its original identity. Evangelicals, in part, began to embrace ideas and practices that would have been seen as unbiblical two generations before. With no solid understanding of identity to anchor them, the evangelical community began to lose any sense of definition. In what age could the following statement have been endorsed other than our own? “Our task may well be to allow and encourage Muslims and Hindus and Chinese to follow Christ without identifying themselves with a foreign religion.”[x]
At the same time, evangelicals understood the need to avoid a coming catastrophe, the inevitable consequence of its progressive disintegration. They needed to find some kind of overarching identity. To some, it meant recovering the past; but in an a postmodern age that allows for such customization and redefinition, whose history? The assimilation by many evangelicals of the modernist critique of traditional Protestantism meant that any story that could be embraced would have to not be the orthodox one. Some evangelicals foreswore any confidence in the magisterial Reformation and chose instead to embrace the Left wing or radical Reformation. The result of this of course was the disenfranchisement of Luther and Calvin in favour of either the Anabaptists, as conservative champions of the Bible, or of the rationalist wing of the Radical Reformation. The latter included new voices such as that of Faustus Socinus, who championed the exclusive use of Scripture and reason, to the detriment of tradition and his eschewing of the deity of Christ, the Trinity, atonement, original sin, predestination, and the resurrection of the body.[xi] All of this speculation was made possible because Socinus and a generation of others rejected the received wisdom of the Church, the earlier history, complete with its creeds, confessions and councils. As Sebastian Franck and other radicals asserted, all one needed was the text and the inner presence of the Holy Spirit. These ideas are alive and well. They suffuse the contemporary Western church and have been championed by a large portion of the missionary community. It’s not your granddad’s church anymore.
Our uncertain sense of who we all are in Christ makes us vulnerable to other voices. In particular, we are prone to corruption by worldly Svengalis shaping our self-understanding. We have become a people without roots, constantly reshaped by every present contingency, tossed about in the riptides of fashion or theory. Consider the impact of Wade Clark Roof’s observation, “Sociologically speaking, there is no church for all time.” We have made such a virtue of options that we have lost almost all sense of self. “We have lost our way. “The Church’s unwitting capitulation to powerful cultural forces has caused it to lose its prophetic, other-worldly voice. We must remember that we are the people of the future, formed by the past, and living in the present.”[xii] The evangelical world has lost its way. We have gone the way of the modern man, adrift on a dark sea without any light to guide us or any shore to hug. We have a compass, but all of the bearings point north. I contend that recovering our true identity is the only viable option. I also contend that this identity must be rooted in an evangelical faith found within the apostolic, international, visible and interdependent church. I do not think so because I believe that tradition trumps Scripture. In fact, I think that a clear understanding of Scripture requires such a conclusion. I hope to prove my point by reintroducing us all to the church found in the Book of Revelation.
The Revelational Church
What exactly is the church? It seems to me that along with other issues, we typically start in the wrong place when we address this question. We start and focus attention on the meaning of ekklesia or we look for examples in the Book of Acts. What we neglect however are basic presuppositional issues that effect everything else we know about the church. Simon Chan’s recent Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community is a great blessing to us in placing a spotlight on the basic nature of the church. He inquires, “Is the church to be seen as an instrument to accomplish God’s purpose in creation, or is the church the expression of God’s ultimate purpose itself?”[xiii] Another way of asking the question is, “Does the church exist for the sake of creation or did God create the world because he wished to create and love a covenantal community, the church?” If the church is primarily an instrument, then everything it is and does is simply a means to a more significant end. God wanted a particular kind of creation, but sin intruded, forcing God to craft a solution that included the church, but also might logically include other options. Chan comments that this approach ends up seeing the Old Testament parenthetically, ignores the core covenantal relations between God and humanity and conceives of the church as a subspecies of creation. Reading the Book of Revelation, particularly in the light of Genesis, Exodus and Ezekiel emphatically denies this instrumentalist understanding of the church.
This, however, is not the picture we gain from reading the Bible as a whole. The world was created as a means through which God could create and love a covenantal people, a holy nation, what we now know as the church. As Chan notes, in this sense the church precedes creation since creation was made for the sake of the church.[xiv] If this is true, then God’s highest expression is the new heavens and new earth, the New Jerusalem, the church. Looking at it another way, Genesis introduces us to a covenantal people formed from the progeny of Abraham and that story culminates in a purified people, all Abraham’s children, living in a new world their home. To be sure the Bible is a story of God’s redemption of fallen humanity in Christ, but it is completed exclusively within the church. Once again, to approach the same thing from another point of view, to accept the church as an end and not a means is to grasp that the church is indeed a culture and not simply a component within a culture. So much for the endless fragmentation of the church when we overemphasize the incarnation. We can finally see the gospel as truly the force bringing together all that sin had torn apart. We must see this or we face dire consequences. If the election of the whole people of God is not seen as an end in itself and for God’s sake ‘to the praise of God’s glory’, the tendency is to see the church as simply one of a number of entities whose legitimacy is to be established solely based on their ability to serve a higher, all-transcending goal” (namely the renewal of creation and salvation of people).[xv] This however clashes with the biblical evidence. First, through the Holy Spirit, the church is uniquely united with the godhead and therefore cannot be either optional or only one solution among many. Second, it means that it is not simply the best means through which to unite with Christ, it is the only means. Finally, it means that the redemptive story of Scripture is ours alone. It is the inheritance of the body of Christ, the church.
To my mind, there is no more neglected or more valuable description of the church than that found in the Book of Revelation. The combination of its often inaccessible language and unfamiliar form often relegates the book to service as either a postscript to Jesus’ resurrection or as an expression of a kind of Christian voyeurism. Even its omega position within the canon leaves the impression that the only reason for its placement is that it deals with the future, the things that happen last. This is a shame in as much as the work also pulls together the first 65 chapters of the canonical text and serves to summarize the entire content of the Bible for the church of the time. If it did all of that for them, perhaps it might do the same for us.
To be sure, it does deal with the future, but I think that its positioning serves more than one purpose. Some of these are directly relevant for our discussion. In addition to describing the future of creation and of redeemed humanity, the book also functions to remind the church of its true identity as seen from the perspective of heaven (Rev 4:1ff). Such a reminder is imperative since the churches in the book balance on the edge of persecution and compromise. The degree to which actual persecution was present in Domitian’s reign is disputed, ranging from the positing of campaigns of coercion and sporadic physical violence to those who see the book as a prophecy looking forward to great future persecution. The resolution of disagreements concerning the scope of persecution is not essential to our discussion. Even the threat of systematic persecution could result in the sorts of behaviour addressed by the book.[xvi]
In short, members of the visible churches were tempted to either recant their faith or at least make concessions to the prevailing authorities on behalf of the popular culture that dangerously compromised their faith and its effectiveness as a witness to the nations. G.K. Beale recounts the options. In addition to the obvious choices of recantation or openly confessing Christ, believers could attend trade guild festivals honouring foreign gods or practiced deception, by openly supporting the gods while secretly professing faith in Christ.[xvii] The predicament of the believers remains as fresh and relevant to us as it was to them.
John counters the drift of vacillating believers by reminding them of their true heritage, their true identity. Richard Bauckham describes the process as “a purging of the Christian imagination” by providing prophetic counter-images that offer an alternative perspective on contemporary life.[xviii] Rather than simply stating propositions, he weaves together a description that meshes together the Old and New Testament’s understandings of the people of God. The church is not simply a body of people with convictions about Jesus. They are the people of God, chosen by him to indwell and then serve as both beacon and army to the nations. It is a relationship that long predates Christ’s incarnation. Christ is significant in that he provides the only means with which to properly understand the Old Testament record, but there is also a sense in which the Old interprets the New. Revelation is crammed with the interplay of both Testaments, bringing both together into a whole that is then extended into the future. In a sense, it is the ultimate book of shalom, of wholeness. Everything comes together and finds its true place in the creation order, every promise is realized in Christ’s “yes” and every thought or practice that serves as an idolatrous substitute is exposed and purged.
At the heart of Revelation’s description is the Church as a worshiping community. Beyond everything else, this underlines our identity based on our relationship to God not things we do. Think of how critical such an insight is. There is the immense temptation to pride based on how well we demonstrate our identity and there is a powerful temptation to despair when we fail to carry out our calling. The letters to the churches in Revelation demonstrate that concern. To both the threat posed by overconfidence and the threat of the sense of helplessness, God answers with an overwhelming portrait of the Bride of Christ. How does John follow up his pastoral letters to the churches? He sees a door opened into heaven and what do we see (Rev 4:1)? We see the church as a worshiping community. Why is this important for seven churches with the sword of persecution dangling over them? First, it reminds them that what the world says and what the world thinks does not ultimately matter. It does not matter because the church is not essentially of the world. The celebration of Word and Sacrament testify to the ontological difference as well as form the church itself. The church in its worship opposes everything that the world stands for.[xix] It was formed by God and exists for God’s glory. As Chan says, the end of worship is worship.[xx] Finally, it is in worship that we both respond to and identify ourselves with God’s complete character as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Any worship or any religious practice that does less is sub-biblical and non-Christian. It is only this sort of identity forged in worship that can empower the Body of Christ as it ministers in the world.
What then does all of this say to the church? Who is it in practical terms and where is it headed? Revelation serves to encourage the church to faithfully testify to Christ to the world and to the corrupt, adulterated church, regardless of cost. But on what basis should Christians act? What makes such a response in the face of persecution imperative? The answer is in a sense simple. The church must remember who it really is. But who does John say that the church really is? One answer of course is found in the complex interplay of Old and New Testament motifs. The church is Israel enlarged by the nations and fulfilled in Christ. It is the people of Exodus, freed from oppression by God, saved and coming home where they belong. It is the elect of God, not in the sense that everyone in the visible assembly of Israel or in the worldwide church is saved, but in the larger sense that salvation is only found within that covenantal body. The central image reinforcing the exodus theme is Christ the Passover Lamb introduced in Rev 5:9-10, ransoming people to God. As Bauckham points out, we then see that it is the Christian martyrs, the faithful witnesses that comprise the exodus (Rev 15:2-4), singing a new Song of Moses, not as one homogeneous people of God as in Exodus 15, but rather as the redeemed nations, the new Israel of God, moving to their new home.[xxi]
Furthermore, the image of wilderness wanderers is once again juxtaposed with the martyr. The martyrs are the members of the heavenly host of eschatological Israel waging a spiritual conquest of fallen creation at the behest of their Lord and King, the risen Lamb. They are also part of the New Exodus, moving from earthly cities that persecuted them to a heavenly city. As they go, they witness without reservation or distortion to the one who saved them. It is this common faithful witness that most identifies the people of God in the Revelation. Beyond this, it is a witness not only to Christ as Lord and God in the present, but part of a Song that has been sung by God’s Covenant children starting in Genesis. It is a family tune. It is also Jesus’ song. When we live out our identity as martyr-witnesses, we are singing with Jesus, we are following after him, cross and all.
The New Jerusalem well explains this identity in gathering. They are therefore moving from a fallen world that had twisted and imprisoned them to a new one that flowed with milk and honey, or as Revelation itself illustrated, a city whose inhabitants would be nourished forever with a river of life, illuminated with the constant presence of the living God, and healed with the leaves of the tree of life. In contrast to Rome, prostituted cosmopolitanism personified, Jerusalem, by contrast, is the city of peace and shalom (wholeness, completion, and peace) for all of God’s people.[xxii] It is the completion of creation, not an agent in that process. It is not a sociological invention. It is not a parenthesis. It is not one of many means to Christ. It is the tent of meeting, like the tabernacle (skene) created after the exodus from Egypt, but eschatologically completed in Christ. It evokes memories of Ezekiel. “I will make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will set them in their land and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in their midst forevermore. My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God and they shall be my people (Ezek 37:26-27).” This promise is in turn renewed and consummated in Revelation: “Behold the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God (Rev 21:3).”
This new Israel would also be a body of nations. Baruch Maoz points out the relevance of Ephesians’ conclusion that “Before the world was made, God had purposed to gather all things into Christ (1:10). The calling of Jews and Gentiles into one body of faith, love and obedience is an outworking of that purpose (1:10-23).”[xxiii] In this way, Revelation reflects the culmination of the Abrahamic promises made in Genesis 17. God’s people would be a multitude of nations (Gen 17:4). In other words, John is not saying that the church would consist of a Christ-following Israel and the nations. There would not be more than one church. “A more probable analysis is that Gen 17:2ff, and especially Gen 35:11 and 48:3-4, 19 refer to the increase of the Israelite seed, which becomes so dominant on earth that other “nations” identify with Israel and are accordingly blessed by being included in God’s people, true Israel.”[xxiv] This is exciting. It means that the basic definition of the one true church necessarily includes the nations. Genesis 22 and 26 extend the point by underlining the fact that everything flows out of the patriarch’s seed. The church cannot be a loose conglomeration of peoples and cultures sharing the same general experiences and convictions. The church is something more organic. It is the end of creation, not the other way around, its final shalom or resting place.
Revelation’s use of numbers underlines the continuity with Israel. There is a heavenly census taken of the people of God. The number is easy enough to explain. The number 12 has always been associated with the people of God, Israel, being representative of the number of the tribes of Israel. Twelve is also the number of the apostles. The combination is multiplied by 1,000 to indicate the entire people of God as Rev. 7:9-17 indicates.[xxv] Though the number of believers is symbolic at 144,000, it does underline the covenantal connection. Israel too numbered its believers, and interestingly enough, at the same general point. Israel numbered its host when it went to war (see Num 1:3ff; 26:2; 1Chr 27:23; 2 Sa 24:1-9). Revelation paints its picture against the backdrop of cosmic conflict. It was the holy nation that went to war in the Old Testament and it is the holy people of God from all over the world that enters the fray today. Therefore, the 144,000 do not describe a remnant of true believers, but the whole church engaged in struggle, from which if faithful, it will emerge purified.[xxvi] Each letter to the seven churches in chapters two and three culminates in “to the one who conquers (or overcomes), clearly a military reference. The real difference between the Old Testament and the New is the manner in which the battle is waged and victory is won. Christ conquered through his sacrificial death on the cross and the subsequent defeat of death through the resurrection. Jesus was obedient even unto death. By remaining faithful witnesses through suffering and even death the church is triumphant, victory by paradox. Just as God has redeemed people from all the nations through a suffering prophetic witness (Rev 5:9), so he will use their own suffering prophetic witness to reach the ends of the earth with the gospel (Rev 11:3-13).[xxvii] The overarching point that the Revelation makes is that the church, the entire people of God are to be characterized by martyr-witness in the face of the world’s opposition that judges the world, sanctifies the Body and ushers in the triumph of God’s kingly rule.
Revelation gives us something quite indispensable, a witness that subverts any attempt of the church to surrender itself to the prevailing culture. It also gives us a clear understanding of ourselves in terms that effectively knit us to every other part of the church, everywhere and for all time. As we struggle to find coherence and cohesion in our postmodern world, perhaps we would benefit from listening more intently to the last word God gave us before he closed the book. I suggest that several aspects of Revelation’s portrait of the church point the way forward for us. Revelation, for example, addresses the church as a covenantal community. It is the olive tree, Israel of God. There is therefore only one Body of Christ, one redeemed family. Second, it is a community of martyr-witnesses engaged in spiritual conflict as it journeys through ungodly cultures. Third, it is comprised as a single visible body of all of the nations. In other words, the international nature of the church is a basic component of its identity, not just a consequence of its missiological activity. This, in turn, implies an additional feature of the Revelational church. Its webs of relationships are secured interdependently. The nations are therefore indispensable to one another. The curse of the Tower of Babel dissolves into the realized community of Mt Zion. My point is that this picture should be paradigmic for the church today, rather than serve as an eschatological distant horizon; with us toiling within church structures formed by 16th and 17th century political settlements. Truly, the Bible presents many wonderful images of the church. I simply assert that none have greater urgency for our own time than those found in Revelation. We desperately need to hear in our time that we are most basically a single, visible covenant community of redeemed martyr-witnesses, people from all of the nations living in interdependent communion with one another as we engage in the visible extension of the kingdom for the glory of God. When we see ourselves this way and act out of this understanding, we embody the shalom of God and reflect Christ to the dying world.
The blessings of old Christians
Embracing the Great Tradition: As Revelation demonstrated, we must remember that we are one people that exist in real continuity with our past. There is one redeemed community, one people, one family that runs from Abraham through the nations to us. Not only are the nations indispensable to us, so are our ancestors. This runs counter to so much of contemporary missiological and ecclesiological thought. To be sure, we are not advocating a Magesterium or a rigid dogmatic straightjacket that would prevent us from theologizing today. What is envisaged is a self-concept where we sit at the same communion table with the Lord and all believers everywhere and for all of time. In another sense, when we theologize, we do so as though we were sitting at a dining table with all of our learned relatives, our extended family, and because we wish to imitate our Lord, we sit with humility, listening to their advice. We get to speak, yes, and we even contribute, but we listen most of the time. As we listen and engage, we become wise.
We have enormous blessings because we are not orphans in the faith. Sometimes, modern missiology implies that theologizing has to be done in hermetically sealed, culturally pure communities. Accordingly, communities of cultural believers or seekers are given biblical texts in their own languages and exhorted to go and develop their own theological understanding, the idea, of course, being to prevent Westerners from contaminating the process with their own unique brand of syncretism. There are several things we should note. First, these communities are not really theologizing in culturally pure surroundings. They are using translations that are likely the products of Western translators that convey their own theological slants through the translation process. Second, they are taught to approach the text by people using methodologies at least developed by outsiders. These reflect a Western way of seeing at the very least and may, in some cases, reflect the theologies of the contemporary formulators. Third, there really is no such thing as a pristine culture. Cultures like people are always in flux. What this methodology really means is that new Christians from non-Western cultures are often denied access to 2,000 years of accumulated wisdom, most of which is far more valuable to their cultures than the recent musings of contemporary missionaries.
The truth is that we are beneficiaries of a “Grand Tradition” running from the apostles and through the Reformation. It is not a perfect reflection of the mind of Christ, but it is a wise and faithful preservation of real gospel understanding. It is in our best interest to engage and embrace our past, particularly as we receive it through the early church and through the early church’s renaissance, the Reformation. To be sure, addressing these two periods is an endeavor too big for us here. I think that it would be most helpful to concentrate our attention on aspects of each that impact the church today. Accordingly, we will examine four characteristics of the church embraced by the early church that are found in the Nicene Creed, oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. Second, we will look briefly at a few characteristics of the Reformation, particularly those that emerged in the Reformation, but that were impeded in the period of and following the European religious wars. We will refer to these as Reformational values, not as an attempt to lock the definition of the church into the 16th century but because we see in some of these values biblical values that extend far beyond geographical and temporal boundaries.
As we examine what exactly were apostolic and reformational values, we should note one thing that both held in common and that have immediate applicability to our situation. “It would not have occurred to any New Testament writer to suppose that a man might be ‘in Christ’ yet not ‘in the Church’: it would have seemed a logical impossibility, somewhat like saying of a man that he has parents, yet is not a member of a family.”[xxviii] The same truth connects the Bible, the early church and the Reformation. Unlike our own age, the Church was assumed to be the only vehicle for the Gospel. Our contemporary understanding of the Body of Christ as a disembodied spirituality or autonomous communities sharing common practices would have been simply unthinkable concepts to the Grand Tradition. Likewise, contemporary evangelism or missions calling people to Christ, but not to the church of the Grand Tradition would have been seen as outright heresy by any prior age.
Apostolic values: Nothing better captures the biblical understanding of the essence of the church than the Nicene Creed. Though it did not emerge until the doctrinal struggles of the fourth century, it faithfully captured the mind of the apostolic witness. Its framers were steeped in a biblical worldview that extended without interruption from the biblical period. Additionally, it better understood that world than we. The creed represents the values of a biblically saturated church threatened by a backlash from the Mediterranean world that wished to judge the church and the faith on the basis of values derived from Greco-Roman philosophical values. The church could not allow this attempt at syncretism. Accordingly, it resolved to promote unsullied biblical values in the face of great political and intellectual opposition. In this sense, it was a great affirmation of the character of the church, living in the light of the gospel, even when surrounded by so much darkness. Coming to grips with the true nature of its framing should help us to embrace its values, because its circumstances closely align with our own. Far from being a statement of imperial power wedded to Greek philosophy, it really depicted the triumph of the church as martyr-witness, symbolized in the life of a key contributor to its theology, Athanasius.
We believe in one: When we recognize and honour practical unity, we are living out our lives in imitation of Jesus. Consider the high priestly prayer and its hope for the church, “That they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (Jn 17:21). Unity is both basic to our identity and to our witness. As long as we remain divided, particularly when we are in doctrinal agreement, we stand in imitation of the world and not the Trinity. This understanding of oneness is also practical and not esoteric. It has both the aroma of Christ and earthiness about it. There is nothing of an esoteric ecumenical sweeping-it-under-the-rug in either John 17 or in the Revelationary or apostolic understanding of the church. Nor is Moore College theology’s equating of visible denominations with mission societies on target.[xxix] The church is not just an assembly in heaven or a collective of the elect. It is a connectional body in visible communion on the earth.
Holy: We live in an artificial, derivative world. In this costume-jeweleryed reality, remakes and parodies are often better than the original. Foundations disappear and it is difficult to find any sense of true authenticity. The witness of the church, living among the ruins of the present world too often looks like just another sales job, a form of clever (at best) manipulation; all show and no substance, what Texans refer to as “all hat and no cattle.” The only thing that can restore the witness of the church in the world is a radical otherness without radical separation (Eph 5:26-27; Eph 2:21; 1Pt 2:5,9). Philip Ryken observes, “We lack the kind of personal and corporate holiness that would recommend the truth of the Gospel to our culture. One of the great weaknesses-maybe the great weakness of the church today is the absence of radical godliness that would set us apart from the world.”[xxx] We must be clear about one thing however. We must be clear about where the radical otherness comes from. It is emphatically not generated by different behaviour. To be sure, we must manifest radically different values from those of the world, but the differences do not originate in our lifestyle. They are rooted in far richer soil. In the New Testament, holiness is overwhelmingly a characteristic of the Holy Spirit.[xxxi] The church and its citizens, believers, are in the first place holy because they are the residence of the Holy Spirit. In other words, we are holy first because we are untied to the Triune God through the Holy Spirit and then only because of that are we holy because we are separated from the world. The order very much matters. It means we are as a church the ontological people of God. The church is not the church simply because of the functions it carries out, but because of whom it is.
Catholic: Whenever we hear the word “catholic” we rush to reassure one another that it does not mean “Roman Catholic” (i.e. denominational), but rather “universal.” This is quite true and also very inadequate. Edmund Clowney once said, “Catholicity is found in the church’s identity (its relation to the Triune God), not simply in geography, numbers or sociological statistics.”[xxxii] Catholicity is located in particular theology and history. Catholicity first means “real” or “authentic”, not just “widespread”. In its Greek form, it also carries with it the idea of purity and integrity. It signifies an inner quality of biblical consistency that spanned history and extended globally. Finally, we must underline the fact that it is essentially a theological concept that elevates both biblical consistency and theological rigor. Yes, doctrine should matter to the church. How should this visible unity be expressed? How do we live out a unity of belief? It seems to me that interdependence best expresses the dynamic of catholicity. We were created to need God and to be in relation to him, but we were also created for one another. We help complete each other. Nothing better expresses the image of God than a collective, redeemed humanity. If the Tower of Babel exposed the curse of fallen, strife-ridden international cultures then redeemed international people in communion must reflect both the actions and the character of the Triune God. We become a church in its truest sense, the sense that Revelation illuminates with its gathering of the nations and assimilation into the assembly of God’s covenant people, when our visible churches connect the nations interdependently.
In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem enumerated what the early church thought of catholicity. The church was “denominated catholic because it extends over all the world, from one end of the earth to the other; and because it teaches universally and completely one and all the doctrines which ought to come to men’s knowledge, concerning things both visible and invisible, heavenly and earthly; and because it brings into subjection to godliness the whole race of mankind, governors and governed, learned and unlearned; and because it universally treats and heals the whole class of sins, which are committed by soul or body; and possesses in itself every form of virtue which is named, both in deed and words, and in every kind of spiritual gifts.”[xxxiii] What a wonderful picture of heaven. What a wonderful portrait of the church.
And apostolic church: To be apostolic is to go the way of the apostles. It is to learn what they learned and practice the faith as they did. It means embracing Christ-centred and biblically saturated preaching and teaching, expression that displays the glories of salvation by grace through faith. Andrew Walls descries the practice of subscribing to ancient creeds. His approach is to scrap these and replace them with local, contemporary statements that affirm the worship of the God of Israel, the “ultimate” significance of Jesus, the belief that God is active with and through believers, and that these believers constitute a people of God.[xxxiv] This seems to be in a sense a repudiation of apostolicity. Apostolicity does nothing to impede fresh theological expressions, but it insists that their production stand in continuity with the tradition of the church, even when at points we disagree with specific statements. By all means, write creeds and confessions for the here and now, particularly when the culture within which you live requires new theological and biblical light. The process of theologizing should reflect humility and wisdom. Doing so in agreement with apostolic tradition as it has been passed to us seems to reflect such priorities. Most importantly, we need to affirm these truths because they themselves reflect an even deeper reality. The one thing that binds the church to oneness, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, according to the biblical record is the Holy Spirit. In other words, the true church in order to be authentic, must evidence these attributes because to do so is to genuinely reflect real, ontological union with Christ, the truest identity of the church.[xxxv]
Reformational values: Like every other story, we need to start at the beginning. When we evaluate the Reformation, we often tend to start too late, with the consequences. Accordingly, we see it as a perhaps necessary but inevitably destructive enterprise that fragmented the communion of the church. This is too bad, because it overlooks essential points. Because it starts with the end instead of the beginning, it tends to overlook both its motives and causes. To get to the point, the Reformation never attempted to innovate something, to introduce ideas that would fracture the body. We must underline the crucial fact that what the Reformers attempted to do was recover not invent. Specifically, the Reformers worked to recover the doctrine and church of the apostles. People such as John Knox saw the true church as continuous with an Israel fulfilled in Christ. The Church is “the bodie and spouse of Christ Jesus, catholike, that is, universal, because it conteinis the Elect of all ages, of all realms, nations and tongues, be they of the Jewes, or be they of the Gentiles.”[xxxvi] This essential continuity ties our three tasks together, the alignment of our beliefs with those expounded by the Book of Revelation, the early church as enumerated in the Nicene Creed and the Reformation.
Because the Reformation affirmed the apostolic church as understood through its creeds and councils, and in contradistinction to the medieval Roman Catholic Church, it had to focus its attention to the understanding of ecclesiology every bit as much as it did to justification. Every issue that the Reformers dealt with revolved around how those issues were manifested in the Church. In short, even the possibility of the gospel ministry existing outside the church would have been unthinkable. It was the Reformers who affirmed Augustine that there was no salvation outside of the church. This was not because the visible church had some power over the Word or Spirit, but rather because God had ordained the Church as the means through which Word and Spirit were to be manifest. To the Reformers, circumventing this truth would have been like Adam and Eve, ejected from the Garden, attempting to overpower the cherubim, with his flaming sword, and break back in. What the Reformers were doing was recognizing the essential covenantal characteristic of the Church. It was consummated Israel, not some sort of parenthetical substitute.[xxxvii] It was the way of salvation.
Additionally, the Reformers saw in the church, stability and standardization concerning its identity, structure, offices and to some degree practices. I am not attempting to imply agreement concerning the specifics. To the contrary, the Reformers constantly argued about ecclesiological details. What I do mean is that the Reformers shared an ontological understanding of the church, an understanding that it exists in continuity with the past and that its worship in one way or another shared a common liturgical sense. All embraced the apostolic tradition as it was expressed in the later Apostles Creed. Scottish believers, for example, seeking admission to the Lord’s Supper, were required to know it. Reformation-era confessions such as the Westminster Confession of Faith were considered to be expositions of the Apostles Creed.[xxxviii] The Reformers, like the whole church since the post-apostolic period, embraced the idea of liturgy as the best defense against creeping schism and heresy. Calvin himself demonstrated a strong sense of continuity with the church before. He affirmed, for example, that the stability of the church is the stability of Christ.[xxxix] He proclaimed in the strongest terms, “It is also no common praise to say that Christ has chosen and set apart the church as his bride, ‘without spot or wrinkle’ (Eph 5:27), ‘his body and …fullness’ (Eph 1:23). From this it follows that separation from the church is the denial of God and Christ.”[xl] All of the Reformational churches affirmed the holy, Catholic Church. Finally, nothing testified to the Reformation’s essential understanding of itself as the visible, Body of Christ better than its core devotion to the frequent celebration of the Eucharist. “In spite of Calvin’s emphasis on the word, which he held to have been wickedly neglected for centuries in the Church, he also considered the Church to be essentially a Eucharistic fellowship. It is the objective reality of the Eucharist that is peculiar to the Church’s corporate worship, for while the proclamation of the Word is made, in the course of the pastor’s admonitions to the people, to individuals as well as to congregations, corporate worship in the full sense is Eucharistic.”[xli]
We tend to see the fragmentation of the Church into its myriad denominations and we see the advent of religious wars that so devastated Europe that it scarcely recovered from the damage demographically in the 19th century. It never recovered from its radical mistrust of religiosity or of its resulting anticlericalism. This is unfortunate. The Reformation indeed spun in directions that none of the Reformers foresaw or welcomed, and for which we all have to now endure. To acknowledge this however is not to denigrate its wonderful recovery of biblical ecclesiology before the church slid into permanent disintegration. This is a vital point. We reformed Christians tend to see our own national church structures as virtues, but these were the unintended consequences of earlier conflict. In other words, we accept our ecclesiologies as givens. What I suggest is that a careful examination of the Reformation yields ecclesiology that is both biblical at its core and hugely helpful to us now as we see the church develop in a new century with changing dynamics.
This is what an examination of the Reformation’s values yields. First, there is a cross-shaped understanding of Scripture. Where much of the medieval period was characterized, particular in its last few centuries, by moralizing works such as the preaching manual, Fasiculus Morum (A Bundle of Virtues), exploring the seven deadly sins, the Reformation centered its biblical interpretation around the cross and its historical-redemptive ramifications. The Bible for them was about God’s redemption, not just his creation. It was also cross-shaped because the Reformers understood the radical divide between the fallen world and a gracious God, a world only bridged by the cross.
The magisterial reformers also promoted an ecclesiology that was irreducibly connectional. In yesterday’s world, this was a mainstream assumption. It was only the disenfranchised Anabaptists that championed separatism in the 16th century, and following that, their collaboration with English Puritan exiles in the Netherlands in the following century that led to English separatist churches. Aside from a very few Anabaptists, the Reformation was characterized by connectional churches that were committed to the necessary and deliberate interconnectivity of visible bodies of believers. These connections did not stop at the border but in particular with Reformed churches extended internationally and interdependently. These were mutually supportive ministries that served as visible affirmations that every people group and culture were being transformed by Christ in such a way that each contributed indispensably to the universal sanctification and holiness of the entire Church.
These connections extended interpersonally to be sure, but they were driven primarily church-to-church. Unlike so much of modern day evangelicalism, the Reformation was church-based and church-driven. This orientation is imperative. Western voluntarism has many good sides. In its missiological expression, it was necessary in generating the missionary movements of the 19th century. Voluntarism expressed as evangelicalism kept the vitality of the church alive in late 20th century Europe, a time which saw the compromise and impotency of so much of the visible church. Voluntarism also has a dark side. Wedded to contemporary Western philosophy, it also can serve as an expression of the idolatry of autonomy or individualism. It denies the essential oneness, apostolicity, and catholicity of the faith, something that only the church can truly exemplify. Once we grasp this, we can begin to see just how essential is a connected, interdependent and international church, and how insufficient is a Christianity driven by the parachurch or anthropologically driven ecclesiology. We need the church.
Under girding all of these Reformational values was one foundational orientation. At its best, the Reformation was an expression of grace-saturation. This was not a program. It was a fundamental instinct, implanted with regeneration, that convicted the church that God would use every experience and means to expose our fallen ways and idolatry, overturn them and transform the Body of Christ, individually and corporately into true image bearers of Christ. In a sense, it was a belief that God would truly save those whom he chose to freely love, a choice that only reflected his own character and not any quality found in us. It meant trusting God in every aspect of life, encompassing self, family, church, and society.
A New Heavens and New Earth: Worldwide Christianity
We really are living in a new, rapidly changing world. It is a far cry from Reformation and post-Reformation Europe. Europe continues to real from a full-scale assault on the church. Such is the legacy of secularism. Nevertheless, it is likely that the secular grip on European life cannot continue unabated. The introduction of new peoples not exhausted by religion, particularly Islam, will change the dynamic. “Religion will increasingly penetrate the public sphere, a tendency driven largely by the presence of Islam in different parts of Europe.”[xlii]
The rise of cosmopolitanism: This is a transient period in many ways. On a purely physical level, it marks a new massive wave of immigration. Approximately 140 million people now live outside of their birth countries. The movements of millions of peoples are propelled at increasing rates in this age of globalization. Reasons for the movements are not hard to find. As European population rates decline, a vacuum is created. Basic infrastructure, essential for the distribution of goods and services depends on an adequate tax base, a healthy economy and a sufficient labor force. The decline of European population is, over time, devastating and cannot be compensated for apart from immigration. Looking at things from the other side of the coin, immigration to the Western world is encouraged by the proliferation of failed states; societies in which basic needs, to include security; freedom and opportunity are either denied or insufficient.
The fact that European Christianity has declined in the modern period should not mask a more promising fact. While the traditional centres of Christian vitality, the champions of the age of missions wallow in a late modern malaise; their mission fields do not. Phillip Jenkins sites statistics that make the point. While 820 million professing Christians reside in Europe and North America, 480 million live in South America, 360 million in Africa, and a further 313 million live in Asia. In other words, significantly more Christians live outside the Medieval and Early Modern heart of Christianity than within it. Furthermore, they do not all remain at home. While the media concentrates on the global immigration of Muslims, millions of Christians also migrate west. Recent immigration of Christians has not only arrested the decline of the church in the Netherlands, but that country’s Christian population is now growing for the first time in many decades and at a greater rate than Islam.
These new Christians are a great blessing to the entire church. Not only do they mark the thriving of the gospel in lands traditionally hostile to it, they also reflect God’s intentions to bless not curse Europe and America. Where the nations once reminded God’s people of the fall, they now remind us of the promise of a new heavens and a new earth. The immigrant church therefore represents a new kind of Reformation in its early stage of realization. As these new believers assimilate into their new communities, they do not leave their faith at the door. Often this is confrontational, because these new believers are typically characterized by far more conservative social practices and a rigorous evangelicalism that is at odds with the assimilated liberalism of many of their hosts. To be sure, it is not smooth sailing. The new believers are far more charismatic on average and many retain spiritualities that reflect folk rather than Christian origins. Nevertheless, they do serve to bring the church back to both a more exclusive dependence on Scripture as one, complete, divinely inspired text and to an uncompromising identity as the church in confrontation to the world. This matching of old and new Christianity offers great hope for revitalizing the church in the West. This will only happen however when the two Christianities support one another as interdependent siblings. They need each other.
Rejuvenating Grand Tradition Christianity
What we have spoken about has been the rejuvenating of Grand Tradition Christianity through the interdependent union of old and new Christian communities in places such as Europe. Mark Noll, the church historian concentrates on what this will mean for the theologians and scholars, but his conclusions apply across the board. The endeavor is “frankly a huge task that will require tough-minded engagement with modern, intellectual culture, fresh study of scripture that proceeds somewhat independently of the guild of biblical scholarship, open and faithful discussions across denominational boundaries with other serious-minded and traditionally oriented Christians, and rededication to harvesting the fruits of church history.”[xliii] The scale of this project will require a church that is united around a similar self-concept, international, covenantal, Reformational, and interdependent. It is the church that John described in the Revelation, militant, faithful, sacrificial, united and diverse.
This is the sort of heritage that the International Presbyterian Church seeks to embrace and cultivate. We have a common tradition in apostolicity and Reformation, a common identity in bring martyr-witnesses worshiping the Lamb, a common mission in the transformation of the world, a common hope in the heavenly city, divine cosmopolitanism, the new Jerusalem, a common challenge, Europe, and a new common imperative, the equipping of the worldwide church for mutually supportive, interdependent mission. It is now our common calling and our greatest hope, Christ for the life of the world.
This identity has to drive our ministries and mission. It must drive us to internationalize everything we do, not because it is politically correct or because it matches the realities of modern day European demographics, but because it is who we are. Because we are Presbyterians, we are also connectional by nature. This is not to ignore the Scottish Reformations conviction that the Church is often reformed one church and one location at a time.[xliv] We know that ministry must take place at the local level. This pragmatic concern, however, should not mask the essence of the church nor blind us to the greater movement of God that is taking place in our midst. To be sure, these same Reformers already saw themselves as part of the same visible church. This allows us to internationalize on different levels simultaneously. We can drive to do so on the local church level, through our evangelism, worship, discipleship and fellowship. This means making the effort to understand the difference between our own cultures and the Bible. It also means not focusing our efforts to reach the unchurched exclusively through homogeneous witness. We have to see the nations as blessings at every level.
Perhaps it is in God’s providence that the French will be evangelized through their immigrants. It also means encouraging sessions of elders that reflect the makeup of their respective communities. To be sure, we are not encouraging the forcing of an international “formula” on churches, particularly where no cosmopolitan mix exists. We do what we can to follow Christ and his ways. At any rate, internationalization can take place at the Presbytery level. This is an imperative. It must be one because as God blesses our church with growth, we can too easily fall back into conflating our church and national identities. In other words, if we get enough English churches to form a “national” presbytery, what will that do to our sense of identity and interdependence? The point must be that we learn how to form ourselves administratively for the sake of effective ministry without sacrificing our core identity and values. Even the hint of defaulting to pragmatism in this case will diminish the church. We must find another way.
We must also commit ourselves to recognizing our interdependence on one another. There are many means through which we can do so. First, we need to gain a sympathetic understanding of other cultures in our midst, whether they are the immigrant unchurched, immigrant believers or other cultures in the IPC.[xlv] We need to encourage effective payer ministries that highlight both the needs and blessings of brothers and sisters throughout the denomination. In other words, we must break down barriers that make the other seem exotic to us. We need to shape committees internationally, so that we all contribute to the shape of the denomination. We must build up presbytery financial reserves so that less affluent parts of the IPC are not denied participation in the full range of denominational life. We must develop partnerships with other parts of the church, such as the PCA, EPCEW, Free Church of Scotland, other Reformed churches and other international bodies of reformed churches. These can be of benefit in their own right, but the web of resulting relationships can also provide resources that both fuel further church plants and develop ministries in existing churches as well as enable ministry collaboration between churches, IPC and otherwise. We must learn to take the time to write. It is crucial that out of our union come fresh theology, reflecting the light of God to the nations. We must begin to grasp, for many of us for the first time, that God is doing something remarkable and profound in our midst. This blessing must be articulated, both for our sakes, for our posterity and for the sake of all of God’s church.
Finally, we need to use the insight we have received from our identity to critique our own cherished values and practices. What does a Revelational understanding of the church do to our understanding of worship for example? If the apostolic church and the Reformation placed such a premium on the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist, what does it say about our current practices? Perhaps another way of asking the question is, “To what degree does our current practice of worship reflect a reaction to either Reformation Catholicism or contemporary pragmatics?” Are we reacting to liturgical practices that we think our ancestors objected to, but also disregarding their own? How will knowing who we really are inform our practice of hospitality or leadership development? There are also larger fish to fry. This revitalized understanding of the church as a worldwide communion also should effect profoundly our understanding of the relationship of missions to the church. It implies that missionaries can no longer be afforded functional independency from the visible church, but should rather serve as ambassadors or liaisons between churches in different cultures. Last, if this study points out any truth it is this: we need to structure ourselves so that churches and church planting efforts in the different parts of the world must be seen as one integrated whole. All too often, different regions compete against one another. This is a wholly destructive practice. The new Christians and the missionaries that serve them can no longer see work in traditional churches as either irrelevant or as competition for resources. At the same time, traditional, European and American churches do not have the luxury of ignoring what God is doing in other parts of the world. Our very presence as the church may depend on what God is doing in West Africa or Asia. We must find ways as individual churches and as a denomination to embrace that reality and have it transform our own ministries.
[i] See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 2006).
[ii] See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
[iii] Olivier Roy, “Islam in the West or Western Islam? The Disconnect of Religion and Culture” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture 8.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2006) 129.
[iv] See George M. Marsden, Reforming Evangelicalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987) and Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
[v] See George Barna, Revolution (Tyndale House, 2005).
[vi] See Charles H. Kraft, Christianity in Culture (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1979), Anthropology for Christian Witness (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997) and Appropriate Christianity, ed. (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2006).
[vii] See Harvie M. Conn, Eternal Word and Changing Worlds: Theology, Anthropology, and Mission in Trialogue (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984).
[viii] See Wade Clark Roof, “Reinventing Church.”
[ix] W. Tullian Tchividjian, The Kingdom of God: A Primer on the Christian Life (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2005) 3.
[x] Quoted in Timothy Tennent, “The Challenge of Churchless Christianity” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 10.1 (205) 173. To be clear, Winter was advocating the possibility of Muslims etc., to remain within the religions of their birth. In other words, one should not have to leave Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc., just because Jesus is Lord.
[xi] Keith A. Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Moscow, Idaho: Canon Press, 2001) 125f.
[xii] Tchividjian, 3.
[xiii] Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshiping Community (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 2006) 21.
[xiv] Chan 23.
[xv] Chan 25f.
[xvi] G.K. Beale, The Book of Revelation The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999) 29.
[xvii] Beale 32.
[xviii] Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1993) 17.
[xix] Chan 42.
[xx] Chan 53.
[xxi] Bauckham 71.
[xxii] Frank Thielman, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005) 613).
[xxiii] Baruch Maoz, “Multi-Cultural Churches-Possible? Workable? Desirable?” Table Talk Issue 19 (Spring 2007).
[xxiv] Beale 430.
[xxv] Thielman, 627.
[xxvi] Beale 412f.
[xxvii] Bauckham 84f.
[xxviii] Geddes MacGregor, Corpus Christi: The Nature of the Church According to the Reformed Tradition (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1958) 4.
[xxix] Contra D.B. Knox, “What the Church Is” www.matthiasmedia.com.au 2004. See also D.B. Knox, “The Church and the Denominations” www.matthiasmedia.com.au, and David G. Peterson, “The Locus of the Church: Heaven or Earth” The Theologian www.theologian.org.uk 2005.
[xxx] Richard D. Philips, Philip G. Ryken and Mark E. Dever, The Church: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2004) 31.
[xxxi] Susan K. Wood, “The Holy, Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints” Exploring and Proclaiming the Apostles’ Creed (London: Morehouse, 2004) 219.
[xxxii] Edmund P. Clowney, The Church (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 1995) 93.
[xxxiii] Wood 225.
[xxxiv] Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (London: T&T Clark, 1996) 27f.
[xxxv] Chan 36.
[xxxvi] MacGregor 72f.
[xxxvii] MacGregor, 21. MacGregor quotes the Confessio Scoticana, ca. 1560.
[xxxviii] MacGregor 19.
[xxxix] MacGregor 16.
[xl] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion Volume 2. Book IV. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960) 1024f.
[xli] MacGregor 52. The author refers to Institutes IV. i.5.
[xlii] Grace Davie, “Is Europe and Exceptional Case?” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture 8.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2006) 33.
[xliii] Mark Noll, “Evangelical Theology Today” Theology Today January 1995.
[xliv] MacGregor 71.
[xlv] Maoz.
Note: Francis Schaeffer started The International Presbyterian Church (IPC) in 1954. A small denomination, the IPC nevertheless spans geographically from England to Azerbaijan.
Basil Grafas
Basil is a minister in the Presbyterian Church of America, a former moderator of the International Presbyterian Church, a European-based denomination started by Dr Francis Scheffer, and assisted in the creation of the Presbyterian Church of Bangladesh. A former church planter, he has pastored two churches and served cross-culturally for much of the last 30 years.
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CD REVIEW: Heavy Glow - The Filth and the Fury (2010, private release)
Sometimes, I get this feeling. It’s hard to say where it comes from, or what causes it. But it happens, from time to time, and when it does, there’s only one thing that will cure it.
And no, the answer is not ‘more cowbell.’
I won’t call it a guilty pleasure, because I don’t feel one bit guilty about it, but I have a love for fuzz drenched psychedelia. Have ever since I was a teenager, discovering the joys of the Amboy Dukes and The Electric Prunes and the MC5 and The Strawberry Alarm Clock and dozens of other bands who churned out amazingly catchy, distortion filled, acid inspired tunes the likes of which no band had ever done before…and that no band would ever come close to crafting again.
The past few years have seen a resurgence in this style of music, even if some bands were, in my opinion, more successful at it than others. Black Bonzo, Wolfmother...bands like these (and others besides) really did a great job of turning the clock back 40 odd years, and I can’t help but listen to those albums and wonder just how big they’d have been back when this kind of music actually hit top ten lists. It’s an idle thought, to be sure, but it’s there, in the back of my head. And let’s face it, it’s not like psychedelia and prog have nothing in common… a lot of psych groups could well be considered proto-prog in a lot of ways.
Today…actually, I’m listening to it again as I am writing this review…I’m taking a look at the 2010 EP release from San Diego retro-rockers Heavy Glow. It’s called The Filth and The Fury, and a better description of the music couldn’t be had. It’s dirty, raucous, fuzzy stuff, chock a block with soulful, bluesy vocals, echoed, overdriven guitar, pumping bass and flailing drums all somehow pulling together for a 23 minute trip back to the days of liquid lights, tie dye and flares, and patchouli oil everywhere…without the added effect of potential brain damage as a result of excessive recreational chemical indulgence.
Heavy Glow’s a three piece, with Jared Mullins taking the front on vocals and guitar. His voice is definitely soulful and drips blues, while his guitar playing is a joy. On rhythm he thrashes with raw abandon, while his solos cut and burn with white-hot intensity. Joe Brooks on bass and Dan Kurtz are a hell of a rhythm section; Brooks is a powerful bassist, with a rich tone that cuts through with ease, while Kurtz’s drumming is refreshing in its simplicity and raw abandon. In other words…if you’re coming into this looking for flights of instrumental fancy and intricacy, best to move along now, because you won’t get it on The Filth and the Fury. But if you’re looking for a slab of heavy rock, with the emphasis equally on heavy and rock, you might want to stick around a spell.
‘I Almost Prayed’ opens things up with a bang, chopped guitar chords echoing in an empty hall while bass and drums start to set up the rhythm. We’ve got a slow groove going on, Mullins letting a solo fly before taking the mic. As Brooks and Kurtz push things along, Mullins sings like a man on a street corner proclaiming the end of the world. It’s intense, driving stuff that shows that the days of the power trio are far from dead. It’s simple, but a hell of a lot of fun, and I can’t deny Mullins’s skills on guitar or his vocal presence.
Heavy Glow stretches out a little on ‘Love Ghost,’ which at 5:45 is easily the longest track. The band kicks into a tight bluesy groove, somehow merging some Allman Brothers and Blue Cheer elements (two bands I never thought of trying to combine) into something unlike either, but evoking both. Kurtz’s drumming is impressive in its power, pounding out the beat while Mullins rips off lead line after lead line with reckless abandon. Long, sustained notes fade into feedback, and are pulled back carefully, resolving themselves before slower solo figures fuzz out over a slower beat.
‘Hot Mess’ really isn’t that at all…unless you’re looking at the first part of the title, in which case it might well. I rather think it simmers rather than boils, but simmering is a kind of heat too, after all. There are some nice shifts in tempo between vocal and instrumental bits, and Mullins’ guitar sounds huge, echoing in the band’s rehearsal/play space (these tracks were cut with the band playing live) wonderfully well. The long bending notes in the outro solo are a great touch, adding a healthy dollop of blues to the mix. We then shift into ‘Bourgeois Baby,’ a slicking, bluesy little number with a much more stripped back feel. Most of the vocals in the first verse are sung over a drums only backing, processed to sound telephone call like. It’s not my favourite on The Filth and the Fury, but it’s not a bad number at all.
Things close out with ‘Red July.’ While the other four tracks have been four to the floor garage rockers, here the band stretches out with a bit of a funk groove, with heavy drums, bouncing bass and huge chopped funk chording on guitar. Chords echo for what seem like weeks, feedback threatens to come in at every moment, and I get images of Zeppelin riding the hell out of Ben E. King’s ‘We’re Gonna Groove’ in some of the backing during the verses. The song oozes attitude and swagger from every pore, and finishes up this EP in a cool, blues-based way.
It’s not often that I can say that a title really tells you what you’re getting on a CD, but in the case of Heavy Glow’s The Filth and the Fury, what you see on the label is what you get in the tin. It’s down and dirty acid rock the likes of which fell out of fashion not long after it rose to its ascendancy, and more’s the pity for that. I won’t close the review off with a cliché, as much as I’d maybe like to. This isn’t going to be for everybody, but if you listen to your Nuggets albums as much as I do, you will love this more than perhaps might be healthy.
I Almost Prayed
Love Ghost
Bourgeois Baby
Red July
Jared Mullins- Vocals & Guitar
Joe Brooks- Bass
Dan Kurtz- Drums
http://www.myspace.com/heavyglowmusic
Labels: cd reviews, heavy glow, retro-rock, the filth and the fury
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Walk with Me by Annie Wald
Two Destinies by Elizabeth Musser
Still Life in Shadows by Alice Wisler
A Heartbeat Away by Harry Kraus
Unending Devotion by Jody Hedlund
The Briidesmaid by Beverly Lewis
Found by Shelley Shepard Gray
Proof by Jordyn Redwood
Her Good Name by Ruth Axtell
This week, the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance is introducing Walk with Me River North; New Edition edition (September 1, 2012) by Annie Wald
Along with being the author of Walk With Me (forthcoming September 2012, River North/Moody), my fiction has been published in numerous journals including Image, The Southern Review and The North American Review and included in the anthology series, Not Safe But Good, edited by Bret Lott and published by Thomas Nelson. I’m also the author of a young adult novel, The Counterfeit Collection (Tyndale) and I’ve written feature articles for many publications such as Guideposts, Leadership, and Partnership.
Before writing full-time, I worked in book publishing as an acquisitions editor and then as Editor-in-Chief at Princeton University Press. Since 2000, I’ve lived in Morocco where my husband is the pastor of Rabat International Church. We have two married daughters and four delightful grandchildren.
A Word from Annie:
If you still want to know more about me, you may be interested to learn:
On the Myers-Briggs scale, I’m not an I for introvert. I’m an H for hermit.
But I’ve been known to say, “We’re having a small gathering; only 10 people.”
I love Easter sunrise services in cemeteries.
I live on the west coast — of Africa.
My favorite Moroccan meal: Zahara’s beef couscous with raisin sauce, and tchouchouka.
J’adore le francais.
I once told God I’d marry anyone except the man who became my husband.
I prefer to make things up rather than do research, although I have been described as an ‘infomaniac’.
Peter and Celeste choose to travel as one on the lifelong journey to the King's City.
They are blissfully in love and bound to each other by the Cords of Commitment.
Shortly after visiting the Moon of Honey they discover that the journey proves
much more difficult than they expected. When they find themselves laboring
through the Swamp of Selfishness, crossing the dismal Plains of Distance, and
nearly becoming separated by the River of Unfaithfulness, their love for each
other and for the King is challenged. They must choose whether to continue on
together, not knowing if they can be warmed again by the Kindling of Affection,
or visit the Valley of Cut Cords to journey alone once more.
If you'd like to read a chapter excerpt of Walk with Me, go HERE.
This week, the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance is introducing Two Destinies David C. Cook (September 1, 2012) by Elizabeth Musser
Elizabeth Musser, author of acclaimed novels such as The Swan House, grew up in Georgia, but now lives in Lyon, France, where she and her husband serve as missionaries with International Teams. Look for Two Testaments, her sequel to Two Crosses, in stores now, and Two Destinies, the third book in the trilogy, set for release in Fall 2012.
A word from Elizabeth:
Recent exciting news is that, finally, the whole trilogy is going to be published in 2012. Many readers have written to me throughout the years to encourage me to keep pursuing getting Two Destinies into print. In a fun twist of fate (really the Lord's perfect timing), David C. Cook (who originally published Two Testaments) has offered me a contract for all three novels. The Secrets of the Cross Trilogy will be published in June 2012 (Two Crosses and Two Testaments) and in September, 2012, Two Destinies will be in the bookstores for the first time!
Now 1994, France faces unrest and rising poverty while neighbor Algeria is in the midst of a blood civil war. Risléne Namani, a French woman born to Algerian parents, converts to Christianity and falls in love with Eric Hoffmann, a Christian, committing the unpardonable sin in the eyes of her Muslim family. Eric must find a way to rescue her—from a forced marriage in Algeria, or even death.
A powerful, relevant tale of social struggle, heartache, cultural conflict, and faith put to the ultimate test.
If you would like to read the first chapter excerpt of Two Destinies, go HERE.
This week, theChristian Fiction Blog Allianceis introducingStill Life in ShadowsRiver North; New Edition edition (August 1, 2012)byAlice Wisler
Alice was born in Osaka, Japan in the sixties. Her parents were Presbyterian career missionaries. As a young child, Alice loved to walk down to the local stationer's store to buy notebooks, pencils and scented erasers. In her room, she created stories. The desire to be a published famous author has never left her. Well, two out of three isn't bad. She's the author of Rain Song, How Sweet It Is, Hatteras Girl and A Wedding Invitation (all published by Bethany House).
Alice went to Eastern Mennonite University after graduating from Canadian Academy, an international high school in Kobe, Japan. She majored in social work and has worked across the U.S. in that field. She taught ESL (English as a Second Language) in Japan and at a refugee camp in the Philippines. She also studied Spanish at a language institute in San Jose, Costa Rica.
She has four children--Rachel, Daniel, Benjamin and Elizabeth. Daniel died on 2/2/97 from cancer treatments at the age of four. Since then, Alice founded Daniel's House Publications in her son's memory. This organization reaches out to others who have also lost a child to death. In 2000 and 2003, Alice compiled recipes and memories of children across the world to publish two memorial cookbooks, Slices of Sunlight and Down the Cereal Aisle.
It's been fifteen years since Gideon Miller ran away from his Amish community in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a boy of fifteen. Gideon arrives in the Smoky Mountains town of Twin Branches and settles in at the local auto mechanic's garage. He meets a host of interesting characters -the most recent acquaintances are Kiki, an autistic teen, and her sister Mari. Known as the "Getaway Savior" he helps other Amish boys and girls relocate to life in modern America.
One day the phone rings. On the other end is his brother Moriah calling from Florida. Of course Gideon welcomes his brother to stay with him and offers him a job. But Moriah is caught in a web which ends in his death and forces Gideon to return to the town of his youth, with his brother's body in the back of a hearse and Mari and Kiki at his side. He must face not only the community he ran away from years ago but also his own web of bitterness. Will he be able to give his anger over to God and forgive his father?
If you would like to read the first chapter excerpt of Still Life in Shadows, go HERE.
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This week, theChristian Fiction Blog Allianceis introducingA Heartbeat AwayDavid C. Cook (September 1, 2012)byHarry Kraus
A Word from Harry:
I started writing my first novel during my last year of surgery training at UK. I was a chief resident, and started writing Stainless Steal Hearts in a call room at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Lexington. It was a crazy time to write! I had a very demanding schedule, often spending days and nights in the hospital. I had two sons at that time, and I recognized the wisdom in my wife's urging: "Now doesn't seem the right time for this dream."
My experience as a writer is far from typical. Having received my formal training in biology and chemistry and medicine, my only preparation for a writing career was a love for reading. The longest thing I'd written before my first novel was a term paper in undergraduate school. My first novel was accepted by Crossway Books and published in 1994, and it wasn't until after I had FOUR published novels that I even opened a book of instruction about the craft of writing fiction. This is not what I recommend to others! Yes, I was successful, but I was bending the "rules" without knowing it. I had a natural talent for plotting, but I realize my initial success may have stunted my growth as a writer. I'd have made faster progress if I'd have gone to the fiction teachers sooner.
I have three sons: Joel, Evan, and Samuel. Look closely in all of my books and you'll see them there. My lovely wife, Kris, provides the basic composition for all those beautiful, athletic, dedicated women in my novels.
When a brilliant surgeon undergoes a heart transplant, her life transforms as she begins experiencing memories of a murder she never witnessed.
The residents worship her. Nurses step out of her way. Her colleagues respect and sometimes even fear her. But surgeon Tori Taylor never expected to end up on this side of the operating table.
Now she has a new heart. This life that was formerly controlled and predictable is now chaotic. Dr. Taylor had famously protected herself from love or commitment, but her walls are beginning to crumble.
And strangest of all, memories surface that will take her on a journey out of the operating room and into a murder investigation.
Where there once was a heart of stone, there is a heart of flesh. And there is no going back.
If you'd like to read the first chapter excerpt of A Heartbeat Away, go HERE.
This week, theChristian Fiction Blog Allianceis introducingUnending DevotionBethany House Publishers (September 1, 2012)byJody Hedlund
Jody has written novels for the last 20 years (with a hiatus when her children were young). After many years of writing and honing her skills, she finally garnered national attention with her double final in the Genesis Contest, a fiction-writing contest for unpublished writers through ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writers).
Her first published book, The Preacher’s Bride (2010 Bethany House Publishers), became a best seller and has won multiple awards.
Her second book, The Doctor’s Lady, released in September of 2011, and her third book, Unending Devotion, is out now. She’s currently busy researching and writing another book!
Jody has been married for twenty years to her college sweetheart. Jody has five children ranging in ages from 15 to 6, with a set of twin daughters in the mix to make things more lively.
High-Stakes Drama Meets High-Tension Romance
In 1883 Michigan, Lily Young is on a mission to save her lost sister, or die trying. Heedless of the danger, her searches of logging camps lead her to Harrison and into the sights of Connell McCormick, a man doing his best to add to the hard-earned fortunes of his lumber baron father.
Posing during the day as a photographer's assistant, Lily can't understand why any God-fearing citizen would allow evil to persist and why men like Connell McCormick turn a blind eye to the crime rampant in the town. But Connell is boss-man of three of his father's lumber camps in the area, and like most of the other men, he's interested in clearing the pine and earning a profit. He figures as long as he's living an upright life, that's what matters.
Lily challenges everything he thought he knew, and together they work not only to save her sister but to put an end to the corruption that's dominated Harrison for so long.
If you would like to read the first chapter of Unending Devotion, go HERE.
This week, theChristian Fiction Blog Allianceis introducingThe BridesmaidBethany House Publishers (September 11, 2012)byBeverly Lewis
Beverly's first venture into adult fiction is the best-selling trilogy, The Heritage of Lancaster County, including The Shunning, a suspenseful saga of Katie Lapp, a young Amish woman drawn to the modern world by secrets from her past. The book is loosely based on the author's maternal grandmother, Ada Ranck Buchwalter, who left her Old Order Mennonite upbringing to marry a Bible College student. One Amish-country newspaper claimed Beverly's work to be "a primer on Lancaster County folklore" and offers "an insider's view of Amish life."
Booksellers across the country, and around the world, have spread the word of Beverly's tender tales of Plain country life. A clerk in a Virginia bookstore wrote, "Beverly's books have a compelling freshness and spark. You just don't run across writing like that every day. I hope she'll keep writing stories about the Plain people for a long, long time."
A member of the National League of American Pen Women, as well as a Distinguished Alumnus of Evangel University, Lewis has written over 80 books for children, youth, and adults, many of them award-winning. She and her husband, David, make their home in Colorado, where they enjoy hiking, biking, and spending time with their family. They are also avid musicians and fiction "book worms."
The Latest in Chart-Topping Amish Fiction from Beverly Lewis
Twenty-seven-year-old Joanna Kurtz has made several trips to the altar, but never as a bride. The single young Amishwoman is a closet writer with a longing to be published something practically unheard of in her Lancaster County community. Yet Joanna's stories aren't her only secret. She also has a beau who is courting her from afar, unbeknownst even to her sister, Cora, who, though younger, seems to have suitors to spare.
Eben Troyer is a responsible young Amishman who hopes to make Joanna Kurtz his bride--if he can ever leave his parents' farm in Shipshewana, Indiana. Yet with his only brother off in the English world, intent on a military career, Eben's hopes for building a life with his dear Joanna are dimming, and patience is wearing thin. Will Joanna ever be more than a bridesmaid?
If you would like to read the first chapter of The Bridesmaid, go HERE.
This week, theChristian Fiction Blog Allianceis introducingFoundAvon Inspire; Original edition (September 4, 2012)byShelley Shepard Gray
Since 2000, Shelley Sabga has sold over thirty novels to numerous publishers, including HarperCollins, Harlequin, Abingdon Press, and Avon Inspire. She has been interviewed by NPR, and her books have been highlighted in numerous publications, including USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.
Under the name Shelley Shepard Gray, Shelley writes Amish romances for HarperCollins’ inspirational line, Avon Inspire. Her recent novel, The Protector, the final book in her “Families of Honor” series, hit the New York Times List, and her previous novel in the same series, The Survivor, appeared on the USA Today bestseller list. Shelley has won the prestigious Holt Medallion for her books, Forgiven and Grace, and her novels have been chosen as Alternate Selections for the Doubleday/Literary Guild Book Club. Her first novel with Avon Inspire, Hidden, was an Inspirational Reader’s Choice finalist.
Before writing romances, Shelley lived in Texas and Colorado, where she taught school and earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. She now lives in southern Ohio and writes full time. Shelley is married, the mother of two children in college, and is an active member of her church. She serves on committees, volunteers in the church office, and currently leads a Bible study group, and she looks forward to the opportunity to continue to write novels that showcase her Christian ideals.
When she’s not writing, Shelley often attends conferences and reader retreats in order to give workshops and publicize her work. She’s attended RWA’s national conference six times, the ACFW conference and Romantic Times Magazine’s annual conference as well as traveled to New Jersey, Birmingham, and Tennessee to attend local conferences.
Check out Shelley's Facebook Fan page
A murder is solved and a quiet Amish community must deal with the repercussions. Amid the surprising revelations, can a newfound love survive?
As the search for Perry Borntrager's killer continues, Jacob Schrock feels like his world is about to crumble. Right before Perry went missing, he and Jacob got into a fistfight. Jacob never told anyone what happened that terrible night. He's good at keeping secrets—including his love for Deborah, Perry's sister. But when Deborah takes a job at his family's store and their friendship blossoms, Jacob senses everything is about to be revealed.
Deborah has been searching for a slice of happiness ever since her brother's body was discovered. When the police start questioning Jacob, Deborah can't believe that the one person she's finally allowed in could be the one responsible for her brother's death. Will she believe what everyone seems to think is the truth . . . or listen to her heart, and hope there is still one more person who is keeping secrets in Crittenden County?
If you would like to read the first chapter excerpt of Found, go HERE.
This week, theChristian Fiction Blog Allianceis introducingProofKregel Publications (June 1, 2012)byJordyn Redwood
Jordyn Redwood has served patients and their families for nearly twenty years and currently works as a pediatric ER nurse. As a self-professed medical nerd and trauma junkie, she was drawn to the controlled chaotic environments of critical care and emergency nursing. Her love of teaching developed early and she was among the youngest CPR instructors for the American Red Cross at the age of seventeen. Since then, she has continued to teach advanced resuscitation classes to participants ranging from first responders to MD’s.
Her discovery that she also had a fondness for answering medical questions for authors led to the creation of Redwood’s Medical Edge at http://jordynredwood.com/. This blog is devoted to helping contemporary and historical authors write medically accurate fiction.
Jordyn lives in Colorado with her husband, two daughters, and one crazy hound dog. In her spare time she also enjoys reading her favorite authors, quilting, and cross-stitching.
Dr. Lilly Reeves is a young, accomplished ER physician with her whole life ahead of her. But that life instantly changes when she becomes the fifth victim of a serial rapist. Believing it's the only way to recover her reputation and secure peace for herself, Lilly sets out to find--and punish--her assailant. Sporting a mysterious tattoo and unusually colored eyes, the rapist should be easy to identify. He even leaves what police would consider solid evidence. But when Lilly believes she has found him, DNA testing clears him as a suspect. How can she prove he is guilty, if science says he is not?
“Jordyn Redwood makes quite a splash with her debut novel. PROOF is a hard-edged mix of medical thriller and crime chiller that grabs you on the first page and doesn’t let go until the end. This one will keep you up way past your bedtime.”
—Rick Acker, best-selling author of When the Devil Whistles
“From the very first chapter, the first page even, Jordyn Redwood pulls the reader into a story that won’t let go. PROOF is proof enough for me that Jordyn is the real deal: an author who knows how to weave a tight story, write descriptive, authentic prose, and deal with some pretty hefty issues. I’m a fan!”
—Mike Dellosso, author of Frantic and Rearview (a 7 Hours story)
“Debut novelist Jordyn Redwood has used her experience as an ER and ICU nurse to craft a blend of medical thriller and police procedural with twists and turns to keep fans of either genre turning pages.”
—Richard L. Mabry, MD, author of Lethal Remedy and the Prescription for Trouble series
“A rollercoaster of a story. Jordyn Redwood’s PROOF has everything you could want in a thriller—believable characters, a villain who makes your skin crawl, a touch of humor, and a twisting plot—all bound by fascinating medical and scientific details. What a fabulous debut!”
—Sarah Sundin, award-winning author of the Wings of Glory series
“Jordyn Redwood may be new on the scene, but she writes like a seasoned pro. PROOF is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time with well-drawn characters including a villain I despised and a hero and heroine I rooted for. I thought I would just take a peek at the first chapter and finish the story later. I thought wrong. I read late into the night, lost sleep, and put off my own writing to finish this book. I’m eagerly awaiting Jordyn’s second book and will be first in line to purchase it the day it releases.”
—Lynnette Eason, best-selling author of The Women of Justice series
“I love a great medical thriller and I’m glad to add another author to my list. Jordyn Redwood writes like the medical insider she is. A gripping tale laced with realism, sleep-robbing excitement, and something every reader loves: hope.”
—Harry Kraus, MD, best-selling author of The Six-Liter Club
“PROOF by Jordyn Redwood is a gripping medical thriller written with vivid detail from an author who knows her subject firsthand. A serial rapist is at large in the town—in the hospital, even? Can Lilly trust anyone? Even her closest friend? And just when you think you can relax, the stakes get even higher.”
—Donna Fletcher Crow, author of The Monastery Murders
“Jordyn Redwood’s debut novel is a page-turner with an ingenious premise and solid Christian values. A satisfying read.”
—Frank J. Edwards, Medical Director, Delphi Emergency Physicians,
author of the medical thriller Final Mercy
If you would like to read the first chapter of Proof, go HERE.
This week, theChristian Fiction Blog Allianceis introducingHer Good NameRiver North; New Edition edition (July 24, 2012)byRuth Axtell
Ruth knew she wanted to be a writer ever since she wrote her first story--a spy thriller--at the age of twelve. She studied comparative literature at Smith College, spending her junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris. After college, she taught English in the Canary Islands then worked in international development in Miami, Florida, before moving to the Netherlands, where for the next several years, she juggled both writing and raising her three children.
In 1994, her second manuscript was a finalist in Romance Writers of America's Golden Heart competition. In 2002, her sixth manuscript took second place in the Laurie Contest of RWA's Smoky Mountain chapter. The final judge requested her full manuscript and this became her first published book, Winter Is Past, which was spotlighted in Christian Retailing magazine. Since then, Ruth has gone on to publish thirteen historical romances and one novella. Her books have been translated into Dutch, Italian, Polish and Afrikaans . Her second historical, Wild Rose, was chosen by Booklist as a "Top Ten Christian Fiction" selection in 2005.
Ruth lives on the coast of Maine where she enjoys gardening, walking, reading romances and gazing at the ocean plotting her next romance.
In the 1890 thriving coastal town of Holliston, Maine, the leading lumber baron's son, Warren Brentwood, III, returns from his years away at college and traveling to take up his position as heir apparent to his father's business empire.
Esperanza Estrada, daughter of a Portuguese immigrant fisherman and a local woman, lives on the wrong side of town, surrounded by a brood of brothers and sisters and a careworn mother. She is unable to pretend she is anything but "one of those Estradas." When she overhears of a position to clean house at a local high school teacher's home on Elm Street, she jumps at the opportunity--to be able to run into Warren Brentwood now and again, but also to imbibe of the culture and intellectual atmosphere of the Stocktons.
When rumors about Espy and her respected employer begin to circulate, the entire church congregation and then the community pronounce judgment on her behavior. Warren believes the lie and his loss of faith in her causes Espy to give up without a fight. She leaves her family and hometown for the nearest city with little money and no acquaintances and is forced to spend the night on the street. A man who heads a mission for the homeless finds Espy and offers her shelter. Espy finds the true love of God while working at the mission. Will she be able to forgive the townspeople and return home?
If you would like to read the first chapter excerpt of Her Good Name, go HERE.
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You are at:Home»News Pages»E-Headlines»Sirocco, a Bronze Sculpture Wins People’s Choice Vote in Redmond
Sirocco, a Bronze Sculpture Wins People’s Choice Vote in Redmond
By CBN on July 30, 2013 E-Headlines
Two years ago, the City of Redmond unveiled a new public art program, Art Around the Clock, an outdoor public art gallery. Artists loan the City their sculpture to display for two years. The City of Redmond then promotes the artist and their sculpture and at the end of the two-year installation, the public votes on a favorite sculpture to purchase for the permanent collection.
“It is a win-win program for all,” explained Heather Richards, community development director for the City of Redmond. “The City of Redmond is able to install several sculptures for the public to enjoy and the artist gains exposure and the potential of having their sculpture purchased for the permanent collection.”
Recently the City of Redmond asked its residents to vote on their favorite sculpture from the first installation to purchase as a part of the permanent collection. Over 375 votes were collected and the winner of the people’s choice vote is Sirocco, a beautiful bronze sculpture of a stallion’s head. (Picture is attached). Although all of the sculptures in the program received votes, Sirocco received 283 votes and was the clear favorite.
The artist is Jan Van Ek, who resides in southern Oregon. Jan is well known for her bronze horse sculptures throughout the Northwest. Although Sirocco retails for $39,000, Jan agreed to sell it to the City of Redmond for $9,000 because she likes how it looks in Redmond and believes that it suits Redmond well.
“We only had a maximum of $9,000 to purchase a sculpture, and I was nervous when we put together the people’s choice vote, because I suspected that the community loved Sirocco, but I was not confident that Jan would agree to sell it to us for $9,000,” Richards said. “We would not have been able to put Sirocco on the ballot if it cost more than $9,000 and I did not want to disappoint the community. I was shocked and grateful to Jan when she agreed to the $9,000 price. Redmond is very lucky to have the opportunity to purchase this beautiful sculpture for such a reduced sum.”
Funding for the purchase of the sculpture came from a variety of sources, including an Oregon Arts Commission Grant, private donations and the City of Redmond.
Sirocco is installed at the corner of Deschutes and Sixth Street where he will remain after his purchase.
Of the remaining sculptures, two will remain on loan to the City of Redmond for two more years, “Rain Tree”, a stone/steel sculptural fountain in Centennial Park and “Iris”, a bronze wall plaque located at the City Hall front entry. Two additional sculptures, “Inner Workings” and “Roots” will be removed by the artist on August 14.
All four sculptures still remain for sale, if someone wants to purchase them for their own private use or for a donation to the City’s public art collection. For more information please contact Jaclyn Abslag at 541-923-7763, Jaclyn.Abslag@ci.redmond.or.us.
The next round of donated sculptures for Redmond’s Art Around the Clock program will be installed on August 15, 2013 and will be unveiled during Passport to the Arts, an event on Saturday, August 17, 2013, at 10:00 AM. “We will be bringing four new sculptures to the City of Redmond for the community to enjoy over the next two years. And at that end of that installation we will have another people’s choice vote,” concluded Richards.
Passport to the Arts is an Arts Festival on Saturday, August 17, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM, in Redmond’s Centennial Park. Live music, art vendors in the park and a “Hands-On” public art project will be available. This event is being hosted in conjunction with the Drifters antique car show on the same day in Centennial Park.
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I don't know about you, but I think the Philadelphia Flyers have pulled off the biggest comeback in the history of pro sports. Yes, Philly became just the 4th team in professional sports to win a best of seven series after being down 3-zip, but its the way they did it. Game 7 was a mirror image of the series. Boston jumps out into a 3-0 lead, and they lose 4-3. The Flyers were down 3-zip in this series and 3-zip in Game 7 and they came back to win. You have to give them credit. As for the Bruins, there is no doubt about it. It was gag city for them boys and girls. Once again, a too many men kills them. You know that somewhere Don Cherry was cringing as the Bruins once again had a historic too many men that cost them as the Flyers got that 4th goal with the Bruins serving a too many men on the ice penalty. That penalty is really becoming the story of the year isn't it.
Speaking of too many men, Martin sent me this parody of the history will be made NHL commercials with a CFL twist. Its cruel, but I do pass it along even though I know it may make you frown....
I must admit that I did smile when I saw that. Like Steve Smith's gaffe that cost the Oilers the Cup in 86, Smith and the team got the chance to celebrate in 87. I really think the pain we all felt in Calgary will be replaced by one of euphoria in Edmonton this year. The vets on that team know full well what happened and they won't leave the field without hoisting the trophy this year. Lets hope!
Here's your conference finals sked....
EASTERN CONFERENCE FINAL
Sunday, May 16 at Philadelphia, 7:00 p.m. VERSUS, CBC, RDS
Tuesday, May 18 at Philadelphia, 7:00 p.m. VERSUS, CBC, RDS
Thursday, May 20 at Montreal, 7:00 p.m. VERSUS, CBC, RDS
Saturday, May 22 at Montreal, 3:00 p.m. NBC, CBC, RDS
*Monday, May 24 at Philadelphia, 7:00 p.m. VERSUS, CBC, RDS
*Wednesday, May 26 at Montreal, 7:00 p.m. VERSUS, CBC, RDS
*Friday, May 28 at Philadelphia, 7:00 p.m. VERSUS, CBC, RDS
WESTERN CONFERENCE FINAL
Sunday, May 16 at San Jose, 3:00 p.m. NBC, TSN, RDS
Tuesday, May 18 at San Jose, 10:00 p.m. VERSUS, TSN, RDS
Friday, May 21 at Chicago, 8:00 p.m. VERSUS, TSN, RDS
Sunday, May 23 at Chicago, 3:00 p.m. NBC, TSN, RDS
*Tuesday, May 25 at San Jose, 9:00 p.m. VERSUS, TSN, RDS
*Thursday, May 27 at Chicago, 8:00 p.m. VERSUS, TSN, RDS
*Saturday, May 29 at San Jose, 8:00 p.m. VERSUS, TSN, RDS
I'm taking an Original six final with the Habs taking on the Hawks. Bring back Tony O and Frank Mahovlich!
Being a Pats fan from a very young age, I have never had a fondness for the Brandon Wheat Kings. That being said, I LOVED the opening game of the Memorial Cup. The Wheat Kings got spanked and spanked hard by the Windsor Spitfires. The Ontario champs put 5 on the board in the first as they embarrassed the Wheaties 9-3. All five goals came after Taylor Hall got pasted into the end boards by Travis Hamonic in the game's first minute making everyone wonder if the tourney's marquee player was done for the event. He wasn't. In fact, one of the five goals he scored was a definite highlight reel goal and one you might see for a long time.
In watching the pre-game introductions, several members of the Wheat Kings seemed to have deer in the headlights look. It showed. As for Kelly McCrimmon, one has to wonder just why he decided to go with Andrew Hayes in net for the opener instead of Jacob Des Serres. Its a move that backfired bigtime.
Windsor's offensive outburst had some thinking they might set a record for most goals scored in a game. The team that did that---the Regina Pats. They beat Cornwall 11-2 at the Dome. Do you old time Pat fans remember that? If you do, you remember the near riot scene that was caused the next night when the Peterborough Petes threw one to Cornwall. I have always hated Mike Keenan since that night.
I'm looking forward to the Phoenix-Lakers NBA Western Conference championship. I'm hoping for Steve Nash and company big time as I'm not and never have been a Lakers fan! Sorry Mr. Z!
A quote from Jordan Eberle after his four point performance against Norway at the Worlds.
"It's funny, when you get to this level the game almost gets a little easier," he said. "You're playing with such good players and the (puck's) always on your tape. You're able to do things that you're not able to do in junior." The game gets EASIER! I can't wait until he starts spinning his magic in an Oilers uniform.
Speaking of Ebs, if you read Rod's blog yesterday, he talked about a drink at the Press Box that needs naming. It's a pint of Coors Light with lime and ice crushed in a blender served on top. One of RP's commenters said the drink should be called "The Eberle". Kevin Dureau poured me one of these concoctions yesterday and its very good. I wholeheartedly endorse calling this drink "The Eberle". If you are in there this weekend, ask for one.
If you haven't fired up the barbecue yet this year, there is no reason not to this weekend!
Law and Order has been cancelled by NBC after 21 years. That has to be one of the longest running dramas in TV history if not the longest.
Get outside and enjoy your weekend!
Law and Order tied Gunsmoke for the longest running TV series in history, I believe.
Mitch. He said the game gets easier at this level. That's not the level the Oil play at. Couldn't resist Tony. PS. Wish you were here in Brandon with the guys.
Mitchell Blair said...
I'd love to be there adding to the decadence and degeneracy Tony. You had better NOT be driving back and forth for this event like you did the WJ's.
The only thing about Brandon that was good last night was their jerseys and that hit by Hamonic on Hall. Clean hit! It did look good on them too.
The Suns-Lakers series is a win-win for me Mitch. I'll be cheering for the Suns, but if the Lakers win, then they'll still have my support in the Finals. It would be great for Steve to play in the Finals!
Nate said...
I caught the Mem Cup player intros and was struck by two things ...
1) Windsor must have the ugliest group of junior hockey players of all time.
2) Wheaties assistant coach Dwayne Gylywoychuk was so nervous - he was chewing his gum like a mule on the bench
mongo said...
ok that history vid balances out the tony gabriel story i sent ya lol...here's to a happy ending at commonwealthy in november...
i remember that memorial cup too...i was so ticked off it wasn't even funny...friggin' petes...was so happy when cornwall beat 'em in the final...was a big pats fan as i used to listen to their games on the radio playing sock hockey in my basement...great memories...
and i'm on the nash suns train too scruffy! and go superman and the magic in the east...
Hey Nate
While ugly, you gotta respect some of the facial hair on the Spitfires. Those chops Ryan Ellis has are awesome. The one guy though that has one half clean and the other half beard is a little frightning.
I'm all for naming a drink after Ebs!
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Brent P. Newhall's Blog
21st Century Renaissance Man
50 Games in 50 Weeks: Shadowrun 4E
Shadowrun on My Mind by John McKenna
I’d heard bad things about Shadowrun, that the world was much more fun than the system.
Fortunately, I played 4th Edition, which made complete sense. Character sheets were heavy-laden with skills and stats, but easy to understand.
The system features a straightforward core mechanic: assemble a die pool out of your abilities and roll it against a target number. If you roll a lot of 1s, something really bad happens.
The system benefits from many years of evolution. I felt like the system started with a heavy emphasis on crunch, then over time the more complex parts were re-factored out and storytelling elements were worked in. The current incarnation can handle crunch-heavy and crunch-light games with ease.
I also had the good fortune to play under an awesome GM. He knew the system, he knew the adventure, and he was completely open to player actions. He listened.
We finished in about two hours, which was half of our four-hour slot at Origins. The GM apologized, and offered to throw other stuff into the adventure; we players thanked him and politely declined. We were happy to have some extra time at the con, especially after a fantastic, memorable session. Much better to play a great two-hour session than a four-hour slog.
I don’t actually remember much of the system; I mostly remember having a great time. Isn’t that awesome?
50 Games in 50 Weeks (48)
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Women's History Month / Comic Books
March 27, 2017 Zach Chapman
"Women's History Month is an annual declared month that highlights the contributions of women to events in history and contemporary society." -- Wikipedia. So, since we’re nearing the end of March, I wanted to highlight my favorite comic books created by women. These are some of my favorite books of all time, starring some awesome women protagonists! I’ve provided the links where you can grab them on Comixology.
First up is Bitch Planet written by Kelly Sue Deconnick and rendered by Valentine De Landro. This is an ongoing series, and has two volumes out at the moment. It takes place in a patriarchal dystopia where women who don’t conform to a submissive 1950’s American standard are shipped off to a prison planet. There’s a longest yard plot element thrown in that involves an ultra-violent sport. This is feminist exploitation, with some great art.
Next up is another one written by Deconnick, Pretty Deadly (illustrated by Emma Rios). This is a surreal weird western about Death’s daughter. It has a folklore feel where animals are portrayed as humans and the arcs are all mythical. There are two trades of this one out too. Before I move on to the next one, I think it’s worth pointing out that Deconnick’s 2012 reboot of Captain Marvel is worth reading and a great introduction to the character. It’s probably what the upcoming MCU movie starring Brie Larson will be based on.
Monstress written by Marjorie Liu and drawn by Sana Takeda was my favorite comic of 2016. It’s the only comic book series that I’m actually subscribed to (I usually grab trades and singles willy-nilly). It feels like an earlier Final Fantasy game, only much, much darker and with some Cthulhu thrown in there. It’s epic Asianic fantasy set in a matriarchal world full of war, magic and intrigue. Each panel is a work of art. Vol. 1 is on sale right now for $6.99.
Nimona written AND illustrated by Noelle Stevenson. This is a complete graphic novel about Nimona, a shapeshifting super villain that terrorizes villages. It’s charming, heartwarming and good for all ages. Here's a few panels:
Lastly, Marvel’s Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! by Kate Leth and Brittney Williams is worth picking up. Forget what you saw of the character in Netflix’s Jessica Jones. This comic feels like a mix between an Archie comic and a Marvel comic. The first arc starts off with Patsy losing her job as She-Hulk’s personal legal assistant and ends with her saving the world from an Asgardian sorceress. It’s funny and contemporary.
Psst! Go back and look at those links! If you act fast, you can grab all of these for less than $20. That's like one craft beer in Austin!
Tags comic, book, Science Fiction, Fantasy, bitch planet, hell cat, pretty deadly, Monstress, nimona
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World Record Attempt On Track As Grizzly Lands On The Last Continent
Category: News
After traveling 29,888 miles over 46 days and 15 hours, Swiss endurance rider Urs “Grizzly” Pedraita is well on his way to achieving his quest to set a new world record by circumnavigating six continents in less than 100 riding days aboard his Victory Motorcycles Cross Country Tour.
Grizzly recently departed North Cape, Nordkapp, Norway after completing the European leg of his journey, and is on his way across Russia to the eastern city of Vladivostok.
The trip began when Grizzly rode away from Daytona International Speedway on March 11 flanked by hundreds of owners of Victory motorcycles who joined him to ride one lap of the Daytona 200 road course and escort him out of town for the first part of his journey. From Daytona Beach, Fla., he traveled 3,971 miles in six days and 14 hours to complete the first leg of the ride in Panama City, Panama. He then continued traveling south 6,269 miles for nine days and 23 hours to reach Ushuaia, Argentina, at the tip of South America. From there, he returned 2,088 miles to Santiago, Chile, loaded his bike onto a plane and transferred to Australia, where he spent six days and five hours riding 4,604 miles west across the continent from Sydney to Perth.
From Perth, Grizzly and his Victory were flown to Cape Town, South Africa, and awaited clearance through customs. Thereafter, he took 13 days and 23 hours for a 7,509-mile journey from Cape Town to Cairo, Egypt, and a ferry to take him across the Mediterranean to Tarragona, Spain. From there, he rode 5,447 miles in six days and 23 hours, from northern Spain to Gibraltar, then all the way up to North Cape following a stop in Zurich, Switzerland where dozens of Victory riders were waiting to receive him in his home country.
“My travel from Cape Town north through Africa was largely uneventful, although I met many friendly and helpful people,” Grizzly says. “Europe was a pleasure and I was pleased to see so many friends along the route. However, leaving North Cape, I collided with a reindeer at 65 mph and with tears in my eyes had to release it from his tortures at the site of the accident. Prior to entering Russia, I stopped in Helsinki to have the bike inspected.”
After quick stops in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Grizzly is currently in Siberia and has his front wheel aimed toward Vladivostok. Future destinations include Seoul, Hanoi, Bangkok and Singapore, where he’ll load his bike onto a plane and travel to Anchorage, Alaska, before resuming his tour across North America to a planned finish in Daytona Beach.
As with any epic journey, some plans may have to change en-route.
“We might see some route changes in Asia compared to the planned route due to customs and vehicle regulations as well as availability of quick transfers,” Grizzly says. “I am sure it will again be an interesting leg before I return back to the North American continent.”
The Victory Cross Country Tour used for this attempt was specially modified by Motostyling Zurich. While the engine, frame and running gear remain relatively untouched, other parts of the bike have been redesigned to fit Grizzly’s needs as he covers long distances in remote parts of the world.
“Grizzly’s progress speaks volumes about his determination,” says Nate Secor, Marketing Manager for Victory Motorcycles. “He has been riding some tough roads in remote regions, so it also speaks to the dependability of his Victory. It has been fantastic to track this record-breaking journey and we look forward to his safe transition through the miles ahead.”
Time and position measurement are being done via GPS and satellite tracking. Timing is not stopped on overland routes, such as waiting to pass a country border or when the rider is sleeping. It is however, stopped for air and sea transfers between continents and restarts once the bike arrives on the new continent.
Grizzly’s total distance is scheduled to be approx. 62,000 miles. The current record for such a ride is 120 days.
Interested readers can keep up with this attempt here.
Urs “Grizzly” Pedraita,
World Record,
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Raising the stakes (and wands)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
on November 16, 2010 by Pam Grady
The final showdown nears between boy wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his nemesis Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) in the penultimate chapter of the franchise that has enlivened movie screens for nearly a decade. In splitting J.K. Rowling's final Potter novel into two movies, Warner Bros. may be operating from the mercenary (and understandable) desire to milk its cash cow, but whatever the studio's motives, it's a smart move. There is suspense and action but also room for emotion, and for the audience, a satisfying build up to next summer's grand finale. The minor miracle of the Potter franchise is that it has maintained its high quality through so many movies. This one is no different. The fans will turn out, some more than once. Expect happy box office returns.
Familiar faces here include Professor Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) and Alastor Moody (Brendan Gleeson). Even the late Professor Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) makes an appearance. But these are cameos. With Voldemort consolidating his power and Harry declared "Undesirable #1," the world's been whittled down from the clutter of Hogwarts. Harry and friends Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) move to protect their loved ones by separating themselves; it's three 17 year olds against an increasingly hostile world.
The story begins in melancholy. School is behind Harry and pals, while in front of them is danger and maybe death. An early chase sequence adds a jolt of adrenaline, but the overall tone is one of quiet menace as Harry embarks on a quest to find and destroy the Horcruxes that are the source of Voldemort's immortality. The pursuit leads to the Ministry of Magic, now controlled by Voldemort who's taking a cue from Nazi Germany with a campaign against muggles and wizards with muggle blood. But there are also long, often quiet sequences in the woods where danger lurks both without and within. As if the much talked about kiss between Harry and Hermione weren't enough to convince us the trio are now young adults, sexual jealousy also arises as the three share tight quarters.
Director David Yates, helming his third Potter installment after Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, mixes things up by adding a delightful animated sequence that explicates the legend of the Deathly Hallows. The film might have ended at its action-packed and ultimately moving climax, but screenwriter Steve Kloves goes one step farther. He finds the perfect cliffhanger, one that emphasizes just how dangerous young Mr. Potter's situation really is and definitely leaves the audience anxious for the next chapter. The downside to all this is that Part II is one of next summer's tentpoles, a long eight months away.
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Tom Felton, Timothy Spall, Robbie Coltrane, Brendan Gleeson, Imelda Staunton, David Thewlis, Helena Bonham Carter, Rhys Ifans
Director: David Yates
Screenwriter: Steve Kloves
Producer: David Heyman, David Barron
Genre: Fantasy/Action/Adventure
Rating: PG-13 for some sequences of intense action violence, frightening images and brief sensuality.
Running time: 146 min
Release date: Nov. 19, 2010
Tags: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Tom Felton, Timothy Spall, Robbie Coltrane, Brendan Gleeson, Imelda Staunton, David Thewlis, Helena Bonham Carter, Rhys Ifans, David Yates, Steve Kloves, David Heyman, David Barron
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Vote yes for this frantic, smarter-than-you-think comedy
on August 07, 2012 by James Rocchi
Most American political comedies fail to engage their audience, in part because they contain so little comedy and in part because they contain so little politics. Movies like Welcome to Mooseport, Head of State and Man of the Year put big names in broad comedies, but their laughs come from silly jokes about their stars, not sharp or smart material that's actually about politics. Starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as candidates for Congressional election in North Carolina—Ferrell the incumbent, Galifianakis a babe-in-the-woods challenger—The Campaign is an unrepentantly R-rated comedy, but what makes it fascinating is that it dares to name names and call out real problems in its dissection of money-mad modern American politics. Audiences may not be in the mood for the harsher truths in the film, but Ferrell and Galifianakis provide more than enough strange laughs that their sugar helps the bi-partisan bad medicine go down. Think of it as someone making a peanut butter and chocolate swirl of Mad magazine and The New Yorker—two unique tastes making one great treat.
Director Jay Roach is the man who gave us the Austin Powers films and their raucous naughty-bits Cold War spoofery, but he also directed the acclaimed HBO films Recount and Game Change, depicting the real-life events—or, more bluntly, shenanigans—of the 2000 and 2008 Presidential elections. The force driving the plot of The Campaign is, bluntly, the same as the force driving a lot of the 2012 campaign: Money. Will Ferrell plays incumbent Democratic Congressman Cam Brady, a powerful political force with George W. Bush's vocabulary and Tom Brady's hair, who tanks after a sex scandal. The multi-billionaire Motch brothers, Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, funnel funds into supporting a rival for Cam's traditionally uncontested seat who will then let them run amok in the name of profit. The sacrificial lamb—who will be padded with anonymous, unlimited cash to resemble a lion—is Zach Galifianakis' Marty Huggins, a sad-sack civic booster going through the world with the mustache of a Zapatista and the light-footed walk of a male ballerina.
What makes the film farce is, of course, not just the R-rated jokes about sex and racism and adultery and bathrooms, but also its flat declaration that the realities of campaign finance are a tragedy. Honed and hustled by black-clad political operative Tim Watley (Dylan McDermott, funnier than his good looks usually allow), Brady's transformed from a lapdog into a cash-fed killing machine. But will his cash be enough when Cam strikes back?
There's plenty of crazy over-the-top comedy in The Campaign—or, rather, I am so simple that the sight of Will Ferrell and a bird of prey is hilarious—but wipe off the slapstick, and the film's mean and honest. There's a great bit about the old 'heritage' vs. 'racism' debate that gets huge laughs with precisely how stupid, and how smart, the bone-headed jingoism really is. Both Cam and Wayne get to give hilarious variations on the traditional "I approve this message" language of political ads, each of which pays off with real punchlines.
Roach's direction is also at a nice halfway point between the semi-factual drama of his HBO efforts and the broader flailing of the Powers series—nothing goes too off the rails, but odd touches jazz the film's sleek and cynical 85-minute running time. The script is credited to Shawn Harwell and his collaborator Chris Henchy, and if it stays in familiar keys for both Ferrell and Galifianakis, it also lets them play impressive solos within its tune. And take note: Henchy also co-wrote the similarly broad-yet-pointed The Other Guys with Campaign producer Adam McKay, which didn't just mock cop-movie clichés—it mocked even the idea of street-level police in an era of systemic corporate crime and fraud.
The Campaign is being sold as wide and loose—which it is—but I hope audiences enjoy its cutting edges. If McKay wants to try and direct interesting, money-making political comedies -- and the $171-million worldwide take of The Other Guys suggests he can— then more power to him.
It should be noted that The Campaign depicts both Democrats and Republicans as greedy, and goes further to say that greed and power make "sides" irrelevant. If the film has any position, it's that huge amounts of anonymous money given by shadowy manipulators to any, either, or both parties are bad for democracy. (If "The Campaign" is ever called "Class Warfare," that's when you'll know it's hit a nerve.) Any resemblance between the film's Motch brothers and the real-life PAC-money kingpin Kotch brothers is, of course, completely intentional. (With the sad addenda that real life never ends as cleanly as do our comedies.) The great thing about The Campaign, is that it's weird and strange and surreal and passionate and dirty, a crazy-smart comedy where you laugh until it hurts—in no small part because a lot of it should.
Distributor: Warner Brothers
Cast: Will Ferrell, Zack Galifianakis, Dylan McDermott, Jason Sudeikis
Screenwriters: Chris Henchy and Sean Harwell
Producers: Will Ferrell, Zack Galifianakis, Jay Roach, Adam McKay
Rating: R for crude sexual content, language and brief nudity.
Running time: 84 min.
Release date: Aug. 10
Tags: Will Ferrell, Zack Galifianakis, Dylan McDermott, Jason Sudeikis, Jay Roach, Chris Henchy, Sean Harwell, Adam McKay
priyamehra12 on 03 November 2018
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Medical examiner sounds alarm after responding to three suspected overdose deaths in one day
Kenosha County Medical Examiner Patrice Hall is again warning people of the dangers of drugs, after her office responded to three suspected overdose cases in one day, on Saturday.
Hall said the deceased ranged in age from 20s to 50s. Two were men; one was a woman.
One of these individuals was taken to the Froedtert South St. Catherine’s Medical Center Campus from Antioch, Ill., making it a Kenosha County death investigation case. The other two cases were in the City of Kenosha and the Village of Twin Lakes.
All three cases occurred within about a 12-hour span. Hall said all three are suspected of using cocaine and/or heroin.
“It’s highly concerning that we had three suspected overdose deaths within such a short time span,” Hall said. “I’m bringing this to the attention of the public so that they are aware of what’s going on, and that treatment is available.”
To put into perspective the unusual nature of three fatal overdoses in one day, Hall noted that in all of 2018, her office processed 46 deaths due to toxicity – an average of less than one such case per week. Toxicity includes deaths due to abuse of any drugs, such as alcohol, cocaine, heroin and prescription medications, or a combination thereof.
In addition to the fatal cases, the Kenosha Fire Department on Saturday responded to two other, non-fatal overdose calls, said Jim Poltrock, the department’s Emergency Medical Services Division chief.
Poltrock noted that the fire department has handled an unusually high number of overdose cases in recent weeks. This includes 43 overdose calls between April 20 and May 26, 30 of which were opioid related. Most of these cases were not fatal.
Kenosha County continues to fight the opioid epidemic with efforts including the Kenosha County Opioid Task Force, free Narcan training and supply for anyone in the community, and medication-assisted treatment.
“We want people to know that there are resources readily available to people with addictive disorder, and that recovery is possible,” said Cynthia Johnson, director of the Kenosha County Division of Health. “If you know someone who is suffering from this disease, you could help save a life by sharing this information.”
Further information about prevention, treatment, and resources are listed below:
FREE NARCAN TRAININGS & EDUCATION
Narcan is an emergency medication administered nasally to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose.
It is available for free from the county after receiving a free training session for people 18 and older. Community trainings are held at 5 p.m. on the first Monday of each month at the Kenosha County Job Center and at 5 p.m. the third Thursday of each month at the Racine-Kenosha Community Action Agency, 2000 63rd St., Kenosha. Call 262-605-6741 or email narcan@kenoshacounty.org to sign up for a training.
The AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin also provides trainings. Call 262-657-6644 for more information.
KNOW WHAT A SUSPECTED OVERDOSE LOOKS LIKE
Use the acronym BLUE:
B (Breathing): The person is not breathing or breathing very slowly. They may be snoring or their breathing sounds like they are gurgling.
L (Lips): Lips and finger tips are turning blue.
U (Unresponsive): No response when you yell the person’s name or rub the middle of their chest hard.
E (Eyes): Center part of their eye is very small, also called “pinpoint pupil.”
IF AN OVERDOSE IS SUSPECTED, GIVE NARCAN (if available) AND CALL 911 IMMEDIATELY. You or someone you know will require follow-up medical attention.
TREATMENT/RESOURCES
The Kenosha County Opioid Task Force holds its meetings, which are open to the public, at 10 a.m. the second Tuesday of each month at the Kenosha County Job Center, 8600 Sheridan Road, Kenosha. More information is at http://www.kenoshacounty.org/1917/Opioid-Task-Force.
The Mental Health and Substance Abuse Resource Center can help you find treatment and services that are right for you such as counseling, medication assisted treatment, or a 12-step program. Call 262-657-7188 for more information.
Narcotics Anonymous at 262-653-9800
Heroin Anonymous/Southport Recovery Club at 262-552-6879
Comprehensive Alcohol and Drug Treatment Program at 262-654-1004
Recovery Coaches at 262-652-9830 or 262-658-8166
Resource packets that include information sheets and pamphlets about opioids and related community agencies and programs may be picked up at the Division of Health, 8600 Sheridan Road, Kenosha, and in the lobby at the Public Safety Building, 1000 55th St., Kenosha.
The “A Way Out” program at local police departments in Lake County, Ill., is available to anyone with private insurance, regardless of their residency. This program fast-tracks drug users to substance abuse programs and services. More information is available at www.awayoutlc.org.
LOCK-UP YOUR MEDICATIONS: Keep track of quantity by regularly counting your tablets, in order to make sure they are being used as prescribed, and not misused.
The Kenosha County Division of Health provides medication lockboxes, free of charge, to all members of the community who feel they could benefit from having them in their home. Call 262-605-6700 for more information.
DISPOSE OF UNUSED OR EXPIRED MEDICATION
Kenosha County has six medication drop boxes located at all the police departments. Visit http://www.kenoshacounty.org/314/MedicationNeedle-Disposal to find the nearest location and collection hours. Also, Medication Take-Back Day events will be held from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday, April 27 at the Kenosha County Job Center in Kenosha and the Kenosha County Center at highways 45 and 50 in Bristol.
DO NOT SHARE your medications. Use only as prescribed.
When pain control is needed, ask your medical provider, dentist, or veterinarian if an alternative treatment or medication is available.
TALK WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY ABOUT THE DANGERS OF OPIOID/OPIATE USE. For information visit: https://www.saveliveskenosha.org/.
For more information, please call the Kenosha County Division of Health at 262-605-6700 or visit http://www.kenoshacounty.org/.
⇐Previous Portion of Highway MB to be resurfaced in Town of ParisNext⇒ UW-Parkside, Kenosha County leaders sign off on 50-year, collaborative land-use agreement
Kenosha Lifecourse Initiative for Healthy Families to hold diaper drive, Health Equity Forum
Officials mark debut of renovated Branch 1 courtroom
Community health survey to be conducted via telephone
Kenosha County Parks to offer busy schedule of summer programs for all ages
Kenosha County to host town hall meeting for veterans
Proposals sought for Silver Lake Park Beach concessions operation
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[NEW MUSIC] NUDI BLOCKCHAIN - "SLAPTASTIK" | @barsforbeats
Posted by PlatinumVoice PR on June 12, 2019 at 1:37pm
East Coast Rapper, Nudi Blockchain makes his presence known in Hip-Hop and more
Nudi Blockchain is a rapper who resides on the east coast, The New Jersey and New York City area to be exact. His ties to the streets kept him in and out of the studio part-time. Nudi was born in New Orleans, raised in Bremerton, and beat the odds in Seattle, Washington. Although life for Nudi Blockchain was rough growing up, he stuck to the G-code and is making a presence in the underground scene. He moved to NYC/NJ in his mid-twenties and landed a sponsorship deal with All Access DVD, and the Dogg Pound Next Generation. He turned down offers from Tommy Boy Records and The Dogg Pound in order to remain in control. Lately, Nudi Blockchain (also known as Boy Face) is doing big things. He has been spotted in clubs shaking hands with celebrities like 50 Cent. He got the moniker 'Blockchain' from being a cryptocurrency expert and owns a website for a cryptocurrency called bankkup.com. His new short film "The Perfect Song" just landed on Amazon Prime Video where he makes his acting debut. The film is written by Nudi and depicts how wicked the rap industry can be and features his songs and other east coast artists.
During this time, he launches a site to sell his rap verses called barsforbeats.com and a Rolling Paper line called 'Groovy Hooman' rolling papers for the "420 hippies." They can be found on Amazon and webuyblack.com. Recently, his new single Slaptastik is a dope west coast track, with some killer east coast type lyrics to complete the perfect hiphop unity. "Slaptastik" reminds people that Nudi spends time in the west coast gang culture, and made his way to the east to set up business permanently. While his Spotify streams are steadily climbing, Nudi's new single has similar expectations and will be available on 06/25. The single is produced by Frankgotthepack and packs that fire for streets! Nudi Blockchain has been featured in the 'Urban Magazine' publication and is looking to book shows in the New York area. Follow the rest of his journey on social media and digital music platforms like Instagram and Soundcloud.
CONNECT ON SOCIAL MEDIA:
Instagram: @lixthesixtoy
Spotify:
Nudi Blockchain (also BoyFace, and Boy Face)
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Posted in Current Events • International • Military • Political Stuff
Called It Off
October 31, 2012 By the Common Constitutionalist
More than a few people need to go to prison over Benghazigate, including those in the press who are aiding and abetting this administrations cover up.
While reading this article, assuming you can think of anything beyond seething anger over the needless American deaths, notice how the consulate has magically changed to a CIA compound and CIA safehouse. HMMMMM. Where have heard that before?
Bombshell: Benghazi Targets Painted, Air Support Overhead – Obama Calls Off Strike
by: Tim Brown
In piecing together the details of the Benghazi attack up the U.S. consulate, it is becoming clear that there were U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground, at least two drones overhead and lasers being used to paint at least one target. The question then becomes, if these things were in place for a strike against attackers, who called it off? There can only be one answer, the commander-in-chief Barack Obama.
Fox News reports on the laser being used to paint the target:
At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied. There were no communications problems at the annex, according those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters. In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Spectre gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights.
This went on for four hours and the White House was able to watch this all take place live. Two drones were above recording what was taking place and it seems one was called in to relieve the other, presumably because of fuel issues. A former Delta operator over at BlackFive writes:
Having spent a good bit of time nursing a GLD (ground Laser Designator) in several garden spots around the world, something from the report jumped out at me.
One of the former SEALs was actively painting the target. That means that Specter WAS ON STATION! Probably an AC130U. A ground laser designator is not a briefing pointer laser. You do not “paint” a target until the weapons system/designator is synched; which means that the AC130 was on station.
Only two places could have called off the attack at that point; the WH situation command (based on POTUS direction) or AFRICOM commander based on information directly from the target area.
If the AC130 never left Sigonella (as Penetta says) that means that the Predator that was filming the whole thing was armed.
If that SEAL was actively “painting” a target; something was on station to engage! And the decision to stand down goes directly to POTUS!
There is also the issue of the former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods and a small team that ignored orders to stand down after they requested permission to go and help.
Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small te am who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to “stand down,” according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to “stand down.”
Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were exchanged. The rescue team from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at the consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight.
CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood denied claims that requests for support were turned down.
“We can say with confidence that the Agency reacted quickly to aid our colleagues during that terrible evening in Benghazi,” she said. “Moreover, no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need; claims to the contrary are simply inaccurate. In fact, it is important to remember how many lives were saved by courageous Americans who put their own safety at risk that night-and that some of those selfless Americans gave their lives in the effort to rescue their comrades.”
I can’t help but think that this sounds, at least with the information that we are getting, like much of the response to the attacks of September 11, which was no response. Even more disturbing is what BlackFive writes, ““This is bigger than Watergate!… The worst has to be the team on the ground knowing that the President just left you to die.“
All of this was responded to by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Thursday. He said, “The U.S. military did not get involved during the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, last month because officials did not have enough information about what was going on before the attack was over.”
Just how much information did you need? The White House had emails. They had forces on the ground, drones overhead, a live feed, painted targets. For four hours nothing was done while the consulate was attacked. There was a Special Operations team operating in Central Europe that could have been called upon, but weren’t, and could have flown there in less than two hours. But none of this was done.
It is looking more and more as though this was not only a planned attack, but also that either the White House was either negligent and irresponsible in their “non-response” or complicit.
Tagged Benghazi • Benghazigate • CIA • consulate • current-events • libya • military • politics • safe house Permalink
Into the Mouth of Death Disaster Relief
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Home / compendium decisions / Supreme Court of Justice, Aquino, Isacio...
Supreme Court of Justice, Aquino, Isacio v. Cargo Servicios Industriales S.A., 21 September 2004, A. 2652. XXXVIII
Constitution of the Nation of Argentina
This Constitution, the laws of the Nation enacted by Congress in pursuance thereof, and treaties with foreign powers, are the supreme law of the Nation; and the authorities of each province are bound thereby, notwithstanding any provision to the contrary included in the provincial laws or constitutions, except for the province of Buenos Aires, the treaties ratified after the Pact of November 11, 1859.
Article 75, paragraph 22
(…) Treaties and concordats have a higher hierarchy than laws. The American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the American Convention on Human Rights; the International Pact on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights and its empowering Protocol; the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide; the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination; the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Woman; the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatments or Punishments; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; in the full force of their provisions, they have constitutional hierarchy, do no repeal any section of the First Part of this Constitution and are to be understood as complementing the rights and guarantees recognized herein. (…)
Direct resolution of a dispute on the basis of international law
Ratified treaties;1 Instruments not subject to ratification;2 Work of international supervisory bodies;3 International case law;4 Foreign case law5
Work accident/ Civil action/ Work accident insurance provider/ National constitution/ Constitutionality/ Damage and injury/ Indemnities/ Work hazards/ Full reparation /Civil responsibility/ Damage assessment/ Direct resolution of a dispute on the basis of international law
The worker suffered a serious accident at work when falling from a tin roof about ten meters high, where he had been working, following the instructions of his employer, without any safety equipment being provided nor any net or protection against falls being installed. At the time of the accident, the plaintiff was 29 years old.
As a consequence of the accident at work, it was determined that the plaintiff was 100 per cent incapacitated for work purposes.
In the Argentinian legal system, accidents and illness at work are regulated by the Risks in the Workplace Act (LRT), No. 24557, which creates a compensatory system for damages based on insurance: the employer contracts insurance cover for its employees with a Work Risk Insurer (ART) and the ART fulfils the duties of risk prevention and compensation of damages caused to workers due to accidents or illness at work.
The LRTonly indemnifies material damage, and then only loss of income, which, in turn, can only be measured to a limited extent.
In the LRT system, the contracting of the ART by the employers means they are exempt from all liability due to work-related damages suffered by the employees. The worker only received the benefit payments from the LRT through the ART. Therefore the worker had no chance of claiming compensation for damages in accordance with the provisions of the Argentinian Civil Code.
The Court found that the LRT compensation system applicable to the case was markedly insufficient and not conducive to the full and comprehensive reparation that should be guaranteed to workers in accordance with the constitutional principle that forbids people to infringe the rights of a third party (art. 19). It also found that the system was incompatible with the principles of the “labour protection” and of guarantee of “decent and equitable working conditions” provided by Art. 14bis of the national Constitution6 and other rules in various international instruments of constitutional status (in particular the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) set out in article 75, section 22, of the former.
The Court also concluded that the LTR was not compatible with the principle of social justice:
“[...] The LRT system called into question was not in harmony with another principle landmark of our National Constitution and international law on human rights: social justice, which has important application in the field of labour law and was embodied at the beginning of the last century in the Preamble to the Constitution of the International Labour Organization as a means towards establishing universal peace, but also as an end in itself. Among many international instruments, the Preamble to the Charter of the Organization of American States and the American Convention on Human Rights, in their turn, have not ceased to proclaim and adhere to this principle, which also appears in art. 34 of the above Charter (as the Protocol of Buenos Aires). However, it is unnecessary even to turn to those, because social justice, as clarified by this Court in the exemplary “Berçaitz” case, was already present in our Constitution from the very beginning.”
Consequently, the Court declared unconstitutional the limitation imposed on the worker against claiming full compensation from his employer for the damages suffered due to an accident at work and through its exempting the employer from civil responsibility.
1 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, 1966; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979; Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989; American Convention on Human Rights (“Pact of San José, Costa Rica”), 1969; Preamble to the Charter of the Organisation of American States, 1948; Mercosur Social-Labour Declaration, 1998.
2 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948; Preamble to the ILO Constitution, 1919.
3 UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
4 European Court of Human Rights; Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
5 Belgium; France; Portugal.
6 Argentina Constitution, Art. 14 bis: “Work in its various forms shall enjoy the protection of the law, which ensures workers of: dignified and equitable conditions of work, limited working hours, paid rest and vacations, fair pay, a living wage, equal pay for equal work, a share of corporate earnings, control of production and collaboration in management, protection against arbitrary dismissal, stability of public employment, free and democratic trade union organization, recognized by mere registration in a special register.
Trade unions are hereby guaranteed the right: to make collective bargaining agreements, to conciliation and arbitration, to strike. Union representatives shall have the guarantees necessary to carry out their union tasks and those related to job stability.
The State shall grant social security benefits, which shall become integral and indispensable. In particular, the law shall establish: compulsory social insurance, which will be undertaken by national or provincial entities with financial and economic autonomy, administered by the persons concerned with public participation, without any overlapping of contributions, retirement and pensions, full family protection, defense of homestead, family allowances and access to decent housing.”
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Prestressed Slab System
Slab System Prestressed Introduction
Although pre-stressed concrete was patented by a San Francisco engineer in 1886, it did not emerge as an accepted building material until a half-century later. The shortage of steel in Europe after World War II coupled with technological advancements in high-strength concrete and steel made pre-stressed concrete the building material of choice during European post-war reconstruction. North America's first pre-stressed concrete structure, the Walnut Lane Memorial Bridge in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, however, was not completed until 1951.
In conventional reinforced concrete, the high tensile strength of steel is combined with concrete's great compressive strength to form a structural material that is strong in both compression and tension. The principle behind pre-stressed concrete is that compressive stresses induced by high-strength steel tendons in a concrete member before loads are applied will balance the tensile stresses imposed in the member during service.
So we could say that Pre-stressed concrete is an architectural and structural material possessing great strength. This strength accomplished by combining the best properties of tow quality materials: high strength concrete for compressing and high tensile steel strand for tension.
Actually, pre-stressing is quite simple. High tensile strands are stretched between abutments at each end of long casting beds. Concrete is then poured into casting machine encasing the strands. As the concrete sets, it bonds to the tensioned steel. When the concrete reaches as a specific strength, the strands are released from abutments this compresses the concrete, arches the member, and creates a built in resistance to service leads.
Pre stressed Hollow core
A hollow core slab is a precast slab of pre-stressed concrete typically used in the construction of floors in multi-story apartment buildings. The slab has been especially popular in countries where the emphasis of home construction has been on precast concrete, including Northern Europe and former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Precast concrete popularity is linked with low-seismic zones and more economical constructions because of fast building assembly lower self weight (less material), etc.
The precast concrete slab has tubular voids extending the full length of the slab, typically with a diameter equal to the 65% to 75% of the slab. This makes the slab much lighter than a massive solid concrete floor slab of equal thickness or strength. The reduced weight is important because it lowers the costs of transportation as well as material (concrete) costs. The slabs are typically 120 cm wide with standard thicknesses between 15 cm and 50 cm. Reinforcing steel wire rope provides resistance to bending moment from loads.
Regular width of hollow core pre-stressed slab units is 1100mm, including joints.
The standard profiles have a fire resistance of 60 to 120 minutes.
Our standard thicknesses: 200, 265, 320mm which can reach 20m spans for outside cladding
Advantages of pre-stressed Hollow core
It reduces energy consumption and utility costs through excess heat stored in the thermal mass within hours exploit the vacuum to be used to heat the building during the hours uninhabited.
Achieving good results in cost-saving and energy, facilities and equipment by pre-cooling during unoccupied hours, allowing savings in electrical peak hours during the untapped.
Decline in machinery and HVAC provides 50% of the equipment costs
It can be used in many types of residential, industrial and commercial buildings, schools and institutions.
Energy Savings of 30-50% in hot and cold climates
Achieve the best sound isolation
Use less material in the manufacturing process
Easier in the manufacturing and transportation process
Lighter in weight and the same strength
High ability to exploit the internal voids corridors for electrical connections and telephone lines and sewage
Load chart
Download Slab System File (1)
Slab Systems
Slab System Pre...
We are a renowned company specializing in precast concrete & hollow-core systems. We aim at delivering high-end quality products .
Cretematic, Cairo, Egypt
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Mercury Messenger Flyby Today
January 14, 2008 Uncategorized No comments
The NASA Messenger project to Mercury is getting ready for the next big achievement, the closest ever [124 miles] flyby of the planet Mercury. This is just the prelude to the planned 2011 orbit of Mercury by the same spacecraft, after it takes another three years to circle back around.
As we await the new pictures about three hours from now, our kudos go out to NASA and the JPL project team. Mankind is still reaching [only as we are able, at this point] for the stars, and we wish them all the best.
For the latest, visit the project web site:
http://messenger.jhuapl.edu/
The latest press release:
“Today, January 14, 2008, at 19:04:39 UTC (2:04:39 pm EST), MESSENGER will experience its closest approach to Mercury, passing just 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the planet’s surface. As the MESSENGER spacecraft continues to speed toward Mercury, the Narrow Angle Camera, part of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS) instrument, acquired this crescent view of Mercury. The image was taken on January 13, 2008, when the spacecraft was at a distance of about 760,000 kilometers (470,000 miles) from Mercury. Mercury is about 4880 kilometers (about 3030 miles) in diameter, and the smallest feature visible in this image is about 20 kilometers (12 miles) across.
During the historic flyby encounter today, extensive scientific data will be gathered. The MDIS instrument will acquire over 1200 images of Mercury, including images of portions of the surface never before viewed by a spacecraft. The MDIS instrument is just one member of a whole suite of instruments that will be used to study Mercury during the flyby. The Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS) will observe Mercury’s surface as well as its tenuous atmosphere. The MESSENGER Magnetometer (MAG) will accurately measure Mercury’s magnetic field, and the Energetic Particle and Plasma Spectrometer (EPPS) will characterize Mercury’s space environment and interactions with the solar wind. The Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) will sense surface topography along a narrow profile. The Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer (GRNS) and X-Ray Spectrometer (XRS) will make the first measurements of Mercurys surface elemental composition.
MESSENGER will begin to transmit the new data to Earth once all of the scientific measurements are completed, about 22 hours after the spacecraft’s closest approach to Mercury. These flyby data will shed light on fundamental scientific questions related to the formation and evolution of the planet Mercury. As scientists analyze the data, the MESSENGER spacecraft will continue on its planned journey, which includes two more encounters of Mercury in October 2008 and September 2009, before entering an orbit around Mercury in March 2011.
Image acquired on January 13, 2008, 06:34 UTC.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
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Semi-annual update March – August 2018
During the five secondments, March to August 2018, the MinD team has worked on the development and realisation of the two design concepts, the Good Life Kit (WP4) and the Social Engagement Map (WP5).
WP4: Good Life Kit
The Good Life Kit aims to support people with dementia after diagnosis through offering mindful-reflective exercises and information. The diagnosis is usually perceived as a life-changing event, even though the person today is not different from yesterday. The design responds to feelings of uncertainty and depression by people with dementia following their diagnosis and the need to be respected and stay in control of their life.
The GLK seeks to support the person with dementia and their loved ones through providing tools to help take a positive attitude to reflecting on, managing and envisaging their life as well as managing making decisions, relationships and support. The Good Life Kit includes three parts: ‘This is Me’, which allows reminiscing and thinking about the future in a convivial way. ‘Living the Life’, which contains advice and mindful exercises to help with a positive to daily life. ‘You and Me’, which seeks to help people with dementia retain their agency in helping to identify their support network and tasks to be done, and to manage decisions to be made to facilitate the changes in their lives.
The different parts of the GLK were developed throughout the five secondments in an iterative process and were presented to people with dementia in the UK and Spain to explore them hands on to provide feedback on as well as input into the designs to ensure that they are developing in a suitable and relevant way.
Semi-annual update September 2018 – February 2019
The last half year was key to finalising the designs for the three parts of the Good Life Kit, and to get prototypes of the kit produced in four languages – English, German, Dutch and Spanish for the evaluation. Initially, the kit was presented to the PPI group in the UK, to gain feedback and to help develop the formal evaluation, which is now under way.
Summarising the design developments throughout year 3, the design concept development made significant progress in defining the ideas of the GLK. The different parts of the GLK concept were continually developed through several iterations in Barcelona, the UK Germany, and Luxembourg (March-July 2018), and were presented to PPI groups in Germany, the UK and Spain in January, June and July. The final concept was agreed in July in Luxembourg, and fine-tuned in September in Germany and The Netherlands, ready for the production of the final prototypes under the supervision of University of Twente in four languages from October-December 2018. This concluded the design development as planned with significant design outcomes, including both the design concepts and prototypes, and the co-design process developed and utilised to achieve them, which we want to highlight further in the following.
Drawing on prior expertise of partners (Gove et al 2017), the co-design process was significantly different from previous approaches, which either offered a specific design task to be accomplished, or where the designs for people with late-stage dementia were created in collaboration with the carers. In the case of the MinD project, people with dementia collaborated in their own right, including the design decision making process to decide on designs they identified as most appropriate, to co-design concept development, to advise on the appropriateness of the designs, to co-develop the prototype and to provide feedback on aesthetic and usability features. The basis for this process of embedding mindfulness thinking in design practice in the form of mindful co-design through PPI – was consolidated in year 2 through a conference paper presented and published at the IASDR conference, November 2017 in Cincinnati, USA (D8.5 for WP4). Further publications with guidance and recommendations on the co-design process and the design outcomes are in progress.
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Mother of Daniel A. Payne
Founder of Wilberforce University
The silhouette of Martha Payne as shown in this volume is probably one hundred and thirty years old. It represents the mother of Daniel Alexander Payne. We have meagre information of this mother and what we glean is told by her son after she had been dead more than fifty years.
We learn that London and Martha Payne were free born and lived in Charleston, South Carolina. They were earnest Christians and faithful observers of family worship. "Often," says this son, "their morning prayers and hymns aroused me from my infant sleep and slumbers." He was taught the alphabet by his father, but was bereft by death, of his paternal care at the age of four and a half years. When he was nine years old his mother died leaving him in charge of a grand aunt "whose godly lessons and holy example stimulated me to attain unto a noble character."
Of his father he says, he was one of six brothers who served in the Revolutionary War. Their father was an Englishman. Daniel had a clear recollection of the rejoicing after the close of the war of 1812 when the city of Charleston was illuminated and, that he might see the objects of interest more clearly, his father carried him through the streets on his shoulders. He describes his mother as a woman of light brown complexion, medium stature and delicate in frame. Her grandmother was of a tribe of Indians known in the early history of the Carolinas
as the Catawba Indians. Her grandfather was remarkable for great bodily strength and activity.
Martha Payne was a woman of amiable disposition, gentle manners, and fervent piety. He remembers the custom of his mother which was to take "her little Daniel" by the hand and lead him to the house of God, seating him by her side. In this way he became early impressed with strong religious feelings. Again he says, "I was the child of many prayers. My parents prayed for a son and before my birth I was dedicated to the Lord. Afterward I was taken to the house of God and again consecrated to His service in the holy ordinance of baptism." When but a lad of eight years through that mother's godly example and early instruction he was converted and daily sought his closet "beseeching the Lord to make me a good boy."
Thus this mother, Martha Payne, early impressed her child with high, honorable impulses which were to develop into traits of noble character, making the name of Daniel Alexander Payne renowned on two hemispheres for eighty years as a man of deep piety, unsullied reputation, an educator of first rank, a champion for human rights and honorable prelate of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Rev. Fr. Youannes Fahim Tawfik | Coptic Orthodox Directory
Rev. Fr. Youannes Fahim Tawfik Priest
South St. Paul, Minnesota USA
Website: www.stmarymn.org
South St. Paul, Minnesota
Fr. Youannes Tawfik has been serving St. Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church in South Saint Paul, Minnesota and its growing congregation since 1999. He was ordained as a priest by His Holiness Pope Shenouda III on July 7th, 1999 and served in St. Mary’s Coptic Orthodox Church in El Materya, Egypt. Before receiving the Holy Sacrament of priesthood, Fr. Youannes had an active role in the church he attended serving as a youth leader, a Sunday school teacher, and hymns teacher. While he was dedicating so much of his time to the church, Fr. Youannes also received his degree as a surgeon in urology in Egypt. He was a practicing physician for a few years until he was called to the priesthood.
We pray that Our Lord may bless his ministry and service, giving him wisdom, grace, and blessing to guide His flock in peace.
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Home > Features > Reviews > Myrtle Theatre Company and Salisbury Playhouse 'Up Down Man'
Up Down Man was at Salisbury Playhouse 24 Feb - 12 March. It tells the moving story of a family struggling with bereavement. Centred around 29 year old Matty Butler (Nathan Bessell), who has Down’s Syndrome. Review by Tam Gilbert
Vic Llewellyn as Martin (left) and Nathan Bessell as Matty (right) in Up Down Man. Photograph: Richard Davenport.
Brendan Murray’s stand-alone play follows on from Myrtle Theatre Company’s 2010 production Up Down Boy (by Sue Shields), which also starred Bessell – the playwright’s son – as Matty. Murray’s play revisits the Butler family telling their story ten years on.
Our narrator is Mr Fox, “Matty’s favourite toy,” best friend and alter ego, who speaks on Matty’s behalf, and plays the flute to accompany his beautiful dance routines, which are interspersed between monologues and scenes throughout the play.
At first I was uncomfortable with another character speaking for Matty, but in fact, it was not at all patronising; Mr Fox at times tells us his own thoughts as well as Matty’s, and in this way we are able to learn about Matty’s likes and find out important facts he wants us to know about Down’s Syndrome.
Through Mr Fox, we are introduced to the Butler family: Matty’s parents Odette and Martin, and his sister Darcy.
Up Down Man addresses the question which faces every parent of an adult with a learning difficulty…. ‘What will happen if I'm not here?’
Odette has recently passed away, though her character is pivotal to the story. Her presence is an interesting theatrical device as it allows her to comment on the action, giving the audience her perspective on past events. Murray’s writing allows her to remain invisible to her family for the majority of the play, only speaking to them directly, individually and collectively, at the climax of the play – before, and during the ‘party,’ where they all feel her presence.
With his determination that the planned ‘party’ (his parents’ wedding anniversary) should still go ahead – even after his mother’s death – Matty shows us that he understands that life carries on, bringing his mother’s ashes to the celebrations in a decorated urn, and his mantra, “Friends, Family, Together” helps everyone see a way through.
We quickly learn that before her death, Odette had been very over-protective, taking Matty everywhere; he had never used a bus, travelled alone or lived away from home. Martin’s continued reactions to suggestions for his son’s independence around college and going out are “it’s always been this way…we all agreed.” He is very loath to change anything and feels he should now undertake the same role taken on by his wife. Darcy’s ideas that Matty can help his dad with the cooking and washing (thus preparing for life without both parents) are unthinkable at first, and we are told that Matty is best off upstairs, listening to his music, than helping.
However, the themes and issues raised – death, sexuality, love and loss – are the same as any parent and child struggling to form an understanding and work out their relationship after the loss of the other parent.
Matty sits with his sister Darcy (Emily Bowker). Photograph: Richard Davenport.
Bessell shows us in one of his dream sequences that Matty is gay. The touching duet between Matty and his imaginary lover (interestingly, also the choreographer) is evocative, sensual and strong, and the ensuing conversation is one any father would have, on first discovering that his son does not want a girlfriend.
Whilst the medical and social models are at odds story-wise, it is clear that Myrtle Theatre Company work very much to the Social Model in all other aspects. An example of this convolution, which I feel is intentional on the writer’s part, is in the characterisation of Matty’s father Martin, and his sister, Darcy. At the start of the play, Darcy (Emily Bowker) who lives away from the family home, gives Matty a mobile phone. His parents are astonished and can’t see the point.
Martin:“What did you give him that for? What will he do with it?”
Darcy: “Call people, take photos. I don’t know, what do most people do with a phone?”
Martin: “Who will he call?”
This exchange struck me as particularly poignant, as it sets the tone of characters’ attitudes towards Matty’s impairment for the rest of the story.
We are told in the programme notes that it was important to the company that the same actor was used as in Up Down Boy and that he was consulted at all stages of the writing and rehearsal process. Bessell’s acting was great, heartfelt and funny, and his dance, professional, polished and highly focused. I liked Murray’s easy narrative style, and the mix of scenes and monologues broke the words up, giving a thought-provoking dynamic.
Matty’s voice was heard throughout and his introduction (through the medium of Mr Fox) top and tailed the play:
“This is who I am – my name is Matty Butler. I'm not a child, I'm twenty nine years old. I like foxes, badgers, dancing, eating dinner, going bowling, EastEnders, dancing and foxes. I'd like a friend. Maybe Angel from Buffy. And we'd go on holiday and live together and have dinner and go dancing. I'm not a child you see. I'm twenty nine years old. My name is Matty Butler. This is who I am. And I like foxes.”
On leaving the theatre, a young woman who had attended the production with me, suddenly said: “It reminded me of me, and other people with Downs. Except, I am the opposite. I’ve been to college, live independently and my parents helped me to do this.”
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Friendly URL: http://www.disabilityartsonline.org.uk/Myrtle-Theatre-Company-and-Salisbury-Playhouse-Up-Down-Man
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Home » article » Wordplay: The ides of March would be where?
Wordplay: The ides of March would be where?
Wordplay is a regular column by editor and language writer James Harbeck in which he tastes and plays with English words and usages.
Beware the ides of March!
Beware the ides of every other month, too. And the nones. And the calends. Actually, beware Roman calendars pretty much altogether. But beware the ides of March especially.
We generally think of ides as being a March thing, since Julius Caesar was stabbed on that day. But every month in the Roman calendar was marked by three days: calends, nones, ides. All the other days were counted in relation to them. But how they were counted serves as a reminder that things we take for granted as plain and obvious are actually not inevitable and have been done differently in other places and times.
The Roman calendar was originally a lunar calendar. A month started with the new moon. That was the calends (Latin kalendae), which appears to trace back to calare (“proclaim”). About a week later would be the half moon. That became the nones (Latin nonae), so called because it was the ninth day before the ides—which is to say, it was eight days before the ides. (Confused? We’ll get to that.) The third day of note was the full moon, which was the ides (Latin idus, from some Etruscan word). And then…apparently nothing of note between full and new moon.
The calendar came to be standardized and no longer attached to lunar cycles. In the eighth century BC the calendar of Romulus featured ten months of alternating lengths, 30 and 31 days: Martius (31), Aprilis (30), Maius (31), Iunius (30), Quintilis (31), Sextilis (30), September (30), October (31), November (30), December (30). Does that not add up? Well, the rest of the days of the year between December and Martius were just there, not part of any month. Kind of toss-away. Which is how we feel about them even still.
A few decades later Ianuarius (29 days) and Februarius (28) were added. Months with 30 days were trimmed back to 29. The whole year was 355 days long, so every now and then a whole extra month would be stuffed into the end of February (of all the times to have an extra month!). It took quite a long time for the exactly right number of days in a year to be sorted out. More than two millennia, actually.
With the fixing of the months, the specific positions of the nones and ides were set according to the length of the month. The ides fell on the thirteenth day of months with 29 days and the fifteenth day of months with 31 days. The calends was of course the first day of the month. The nones was the fifth or seventh day of the month, because it was nine days before the ides, counting the ides as the first day.
And, of course, counting backwards. Because that’s what they did. The day before the ides, nones, or calends was the pridie of that day—so March fourteenth was the pridie of the ides of March. And the day before that was the third day before the ides. The day before that was the fourth day before the ides. And so on. Everything was in countdown.
Which means that the entire second half of a month, after the ides, was numbered in reference to the calends of the next month. The day after the ides of March is the seventeenth day before the calends of April. That’s what it was called. They didn’t number forwards. There was no Martius twenty-fourth; it was the ninth day before the calends of Aprilis. But still part of the month of Martius. You may be beginning to think the dates were called ides, nones, and calends because people would say “Any idea where we are on the calendar?” “None.”
But hey, if you think that seems like something from Harry Potter, don’t forget that when they added an adjustment month of 22 days, they stuffed it in after the twenty-fourth day of February. Not the twenty-eighth. The twenty-fourth.
But if we just want to wave our hands and say, “Well, those Romans were crazy,” ask yourself this: would it seem crazy to start the new year right in the middle of a month? So that, say, the first 24 days of March were in one year and the last week was in the next? Because guess who did that.
Not the Romans. Nope.
We did.
OK, by “we” I mean western Europe, notably including England and its dominions — such as Canada. Of course, Canada wasn’t a country then and wouldn’t be for another 115 years.
That’s right, England marked the new year on March 25 until 1752 (meaning 1751 was a short year—but so was 1752: they cut out 11 days in September because of the necessary adjustment in the switch from Julian to Gregorian calendar…that’s a whole other article again!). Other countries switched over to January 1 sooner—Scotland in 1600, most of western Europe at various times in the 1500s. To be fair, the new year had in previous times been on January 1; it was switched to March 25 in the middle ages. Why March 25? It’s the feast of the Annunciation: the day marking Mary’s being told by the angel that she was pregnant with Jesus. Somehow that led to the conception that it would be a good day to start a new year…
So the ides (the fifteenth day) of March of 1599, when Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, would have been almost a year later than the twenty-fifth day of March of 1599…and would on the same day have been the ides of March of 1600 just across the border in Scotland. Beware—or be where—indeed!
James Harbeck is a web editor, print designer, and trained linguist. Read his blog at sesquiotic.wordpress.com and articles at TheWeek.com.
Tags: ancient Rome, calendar, English language, James Harbeck, Roman, time, wordplay
By Editors Toronto in article on March 5, 2014 .
← The Nitpicker’s Nook: February’s linguistic links roundup Q&A: Author Andrew J. Borkowski on the author/editor relationship →
ides | Sesquiotica says:
[…] published on BoldFace, the blog of the Toronto branch of the Editors’ Association of […]
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Selim Hassan .. history immortalized him by the discovery of 200 tombs
Dean of the Egyptian archaeologists
written by: Amira Abd El Basset 16 Mar
To those who wanted to offend me, they did well, who kept me away from the job, but brought me closer to production and serving the country ". A preface may seem interesting written by Dr. Selim Hassan in the introduction of his book "Ancient Egypt". An preface by which the Egyptian dean of archaeologists wanted to send a message to all parties, to the dictatorship system that wanted to keep him out of the scientific scene . To his generation that the job cannot achieve anything real along with it.
In 1936, an intense conflict arisen between king Farouq , Sudan, and the archeologist Dr. Selim Hassan because Sudan had refused to hand some of the antiquities belonging to king Foaad to his son king Farouq , what made the latter charge Selim Hassan with stealing antiquities from the Egyptian Museum three years after taking office in 1939 and was later retired.
Dr. Selim Hassan was then General Undersecretary of the Antiquities Authority, a position which for decades had been monopolized by foreigners,Becoming the first Egyptian to hold that job,Which raised some doubts about that conflict that turned into a tragedy , on the other hand it created the encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. Despite the cruelty of that experiment, which ended his career, and the dream of protecting Egyptian monuments from plunder and theft, but it qualified him to devote his time for research and writing, producing dozens of books and researches.
Selim Hassan was born in 1893, in the village of Mitt Naji, in Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt . His father died when he was young , his mother took care of him and helped him finish his higher education. He got his baccalaureate degree in 1909 and joined the supreme teachers school . He was then selected to finish his study in the archaeology department attached to this school for his superiority in history. He graduated in 1913, to work as a history teacher and then he was assigned in the Egyptian museum under the Egyptian government's pressure as jobs were monopolized by foreigners, and there he was taught by the Russian scientist Gulensev.
In 1925, Selim Hassan got his first scientific mission to France. He joined Sorbonne university ,where he got two diplomas in the ancient Egyptian religion and language, a diploma in eastern languages and ancient Egyptian language from the Catholic college and a diploma of Archeology from the Louvre College . He later got his doctorate in Archeology from Vienna University. Dr. Selim Hassan began archaeological excavations in 1929 in the pyramid region for Cairo University . One of the most important discoveries that resulted from these works was the tomb of "Ra' Wur", a huge tomb found with many Antiquities in .He continued these works until 1939,to discover during this period about two hundred tombs.In addition to hundreds of artifacts, statues and stony sunboats.
The Egyptian museum was a foreign settlement in the heart of Cairo so he worked as a teacher of history and English language , moving between Cairo, Assiut and Tanta. According to the clear superiority of Dr. Selim Hassan in the field of historical and archaeological studies ,the Ministry of Education seeked to assign him for the development of history curricula in various educational stages . Although he remained occupied with his work, he didn't stop dreaming of getting a job in the Egyptian Museum, until he had the chance in 1922, when he was appointed as an agent of the Egyptian museum,to find himself and his colleague Mahmoud Hamza, the only Egyptians among foreigners, which made them face many difficulties in their work .
While Egypt and France were busy celebrating the 100th anniversary of the decoding of Rosetta stone,Selim travelled abroad to Paris accompanied by his teacher Kamal Pasha . Roaming Europe's museums,to discover that most of Egypt's antiquities had been stolen and exhibited in international museums. Upon his return to Cairo, he began writing a series of articles for Al-Ahram newspaper about the looted ruins of Egypt entitled "Our Antiquities In Europe's Museums".
In 1934 Selim Hassan returned to Europe again, specifically Austria,where he got his doctorate in archeology. Upon his return to Egypt, he was appointed as a professor of archaeology at king Foaad I university, now known as Cairo University . In 1936, his articles were widely publicized, which made King Foaad appoint him as General Undersecretary of the Antiquities Authority to be the first Egyptian to hold this job what provoked many Egyptians and foreigners who began to intrigue trying to displace him out his job.
Selim Hassan archaeologists the Egyptian Museum Dakahlia Governorate the Antiquities Authority king Farouq
Ahmed Khaled Tawfik..Godfather of Horror who Has Gone in Silence
"Mark Zuckerberg" .. Emperor of the kingdom of virtual world
"Farouk El-Baz".. The Egyptian, who moon keys holder
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Home » Indexes
U.S. Space & Rocket Center Museum
Crocheron Columns in Old Cahaba
Along for the Ride in Aldridge Gardens
WAC Band, Fort McClellan
Lee N. Allen
Charles Henderson (1915-19)
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Genome evolution of Wolbachia strain wPip from the Culex pipiens group
Klasson, L. et al. (2008) Genome evolution of Wolbachia strain wPip from the Culex pipiens group. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 25(9), pp. 1877-1887. (doi:10.1093/molbev/msn133) (PMID:18550617) (PMCID:PMC2515876)
The obligate intracellular bacterium Wolbachia pipientis strain wPip induces cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI), patterns of crossing sterility, in the Culex pipiens group of mosquitoes. The complete sequence is presented of the 1.48-Mbp genome of wPip which encodes 1386 coding sequences (CDSs), representing the first genome sequence of a B-supergroup Wolbachia. Comparisons were made with the smaller genomes of Wolbachia strains wMel of Drosophila melanogaster, an A-supergroup Wolbachia that is also a CI inducer, and wBm, a mutualist of Brugia malayi nematodes that belongs to the D-supergroup of Wolbachia. Despite extensive gene order rearrangement, a core set of Wolbachia genes shared between the 3 genomes can be identified and contrasts with a flexible gene pool where rapid evolution has taken place. There are much more extensive prophage and ankyrin repeat encoding (ANK) gene components of the wPip genome compared with wMel and wBm, and both are likely to be of considerable importance in wPip biology. Five WO-B-like prophage regions are present and contain some genes that are identical or highly similar in multiple prophage copies, whereas other genes are unique, and it is likely that extensive recombination, duplication, and insertion have occurred between copies. A much larger number of genes encode ankyrin repeat (ANK) proteins in wPip, with 60 present compared with 23 in wMel, many of which are within or close to the prophage regions. It is likely that this pattern is partly a result of expansions in the wPip lineage, due for example to gene duplication, but their presence is in some cases more ancient. The wPip genome underlines the considerable evolutionary flexibility of Wolbachia, providing clear evidence for the rapid evolution of ANK-encoding genes and of prophage regions. This host-Wolbachia system, with its complex patterns of sterility induced between populations, now provides an excellent model for unraveling the molecular systems underlying host reproductive manipulation.
This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust. L.K. is an EU Marie Curie Fellow.
Sinkins, Professor Steven
Klasson, L., Walker, T., Sebaihia, M., Sanders, M. J., Quail, M. A., Lord, A., Sanders, S., Earl, J., O'Neill, S. L., Thomson, N., Sinkins, S. P., and Parkhill, J.
Copyright © 2008 The Authors
First published in Molecular Biology and Evolution 25(9): 1877-1887
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Suárez photography
suarezphotography.com 2019 ©
Home / Our History
Biographical notes of Don Arturo Suárez García
Mr. Arturo Suárez García was born in San Miguel de Allende, Gto. On August 7, 1910; At age ten he lost his mother, Doña Francisca García, who died of pneumonia. He attended elementary school at one of those private institutions with a single teacher and a single room where all the grades were taught; It is worth mentioning that among his classmates there was one, older than him, Pedro Vargas, who in the end would be called “The Continental Tenor” and another of his own age, Dr. Roque Carbajo, author of the famous bolero “La Hoja Seca” and of our song “San Miguelito “.
In his final years of adolescence, he was administrator of the Támbula Hacienda. He once was returning to San Miguel, riding a skinny horse, that had been abandoned by the revolutionaries in the countryside after looting the hacienda; unfortunately, this horse had the brand of the Mexican Army and when he ran into a detachment of soldiers. They took him as a revolutionary spy and summarily sentenced him to the “paredón”; When they were about to shoot him, Don Julián Ramírez, owner of the ranch of San Julián, happened to pass by., Don Julian spoke with the commander of the detachment to guarantee the identification of the young Arturo, who thus left the situation. Unfortunately, he had to continue his walk to San Miguel on foot. This fact convinced him to change his career.
It was then that a traveling photographer passed by San Miguel, who as it was customary at that time, went from town to town, announcing himself in advance in each one. He then spent a few days in each town making portraits. The young Arturo, had a couple of portraits taken, dressed in his ranch hand clothes. And to this day; these pictures, the family still conserves. But the most important thing is that he was so impressed by that technology that he asked for employment to the master photographer. The photographer needed an assistant; and it was with this teacher that he learned all the technical steps of photography. Such as how to prepare the plates to make the negatives, which were then made of glass, and that they were not usually made prefabricated, and of course to develop the photographs and understand the operation of the cameras and their different lenses, contact printers and amplifiers. And the use of lighting, both natural and artificial, the purpose of the focal length and the luminosity of the lenses, according to the object of the photo, etc.
Eventually, after learning everything that the generous teacher could teach him, he decided to settle permanently in San Miguel. He calculated that the plaza was big enough to support a permanent photographer. It was then when he met who would be his partner for the rest of his life, the then, Miss Antonia Oliden Loredo, with whom he married on June 24, 1934.
By then he had developed two skills that never left him, the “Artist Photographer” and the merchant. Being a merchant came as a family trait, since his father was Don Victoriano Suárez Rangel, who for many years had his store “La Esmeralda” in front of the church of San Francisco. These two skills, well balanced, were the key to his success. Photography, being a very noble profession, is often not enough to decently maintain a family, especially one as large as that of Don Arturo.
He had a natural curiosity about technology. It allowed him to always be at the cutting edge of the same, one of his most dramatic and most awarded photographs, was taken with infrared film, which had been developed for military reconnaissance during the Second World War. This film not only captures light but also high temperatures. This capacity was exploited by artists like Don Arturo, to achieve more dramatic photographs. One such photograph was taken from the highest part of the Callejón del Tecolote, it had the tower of the Parróquia and the church of San Francisco in the background, with a dense sky of incredible clouds that show a dark underground, effect of the infrared film. This photo is worthy of being next to the work of the best artists, be they photographers or painters.
When Don Felipe Cossío del Pomar, thanks to a contract with the US government, opened “The School of Fine Arts”, one of the first teachers was Don Arturo, who then had the opportunity to associate with professional photographers and famous painters. Among them are David Alfaro Siqueiros. He created endearing friendship with prominent Master of Photography such as John G. Roberts and artists such as Stirling Dickinson, Leonard Brooks and his wife Reva (also a photographer) and James Pinto.
For political reasons that have nothing to do with art, the School of Fine Arts was divided into two factions; no mention will be made of the details, since that is another story. We will say that that fact led to the creation of the “Instituto Allende” that was founded by the aforementioned Cossío del Pomar and by the ex-governor of the State of Guanajuato, Don Enrique Fernández Martínez, who for that purpose acquired the family summer home of the De La Canal family in La Calle Ancha in San Antonio. This home was then in ruins, which is why, Don Arturo, who at the time was renting what had been the Colegio Salesiano, on Insurgentes Street, behind the old municipal market, facilitated this building to temporarily house the new Instituto Allende. This new and completely restored building was occupied a short time later.
Don Arturo continued as a photography teacher at that institution for many years in which he accumulated a very significant photographic collection, both in quality and quantity. He was always, de facto, the official photographer of the Instituto Allende. He was in charge of taking photos of the events held there, such as art exhibitions, visits of distinguished guests such as Rita Hayworth, the famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda who visited San Miguel as a guest of Mr. Cossío del Pomar and his wife Mrs. Estrella. He took a photographic history of the painting “The Cosmic Man” by Rufino Tamayo, which was painted in the Institute itself.
Another example of his ability and initiative was evident. On one occasion, Mr. Cossío del Pomar needed reproductions of works of art for a publication he was working on. He commissioned Don Arturo, one of the conditions was that the negatives had to be by force 5×7 inches. Don Arturo accepted the commission without any hesitation. At that time, he did not have a camera of that size. He always had an infinity of parts for photographic equipment among them, this time, had a new bellows with which he thought to replace one that was already damaged, a rack and pinion set and a big number of different lenses. The fact is that neither slow nor lazy, he left immediately to the shop of a carpenter who was very capable and between the two of them built a 5×7 camera that afternoon. He took the required reproductions and, as a good trader, eventually sold at a very good price.
His friendship with his fellow teachers at the Instituto Allende, allowed him to always be aware of the latest developments, both in art and technology. Among his Mexican colleagues was Simon Ybarra, a master of sculpture; Don Felipe Vázquez, master of ceramics and others whose names escape the memory. It is important to mention that among his colleagues who came from the USA, was the afore mentioned John G. Roberts with whom he experienced revolutionary photographic techniques. Such as forcing the ISO index of a given film and compensating with the development time and of course the technology that coincidentally, these days is coming to the market as technology for practical use and is the field camera of light. Although someone devised this since 1908, until the advent of electronic computers, its use and function were difficult and very expensive. This technology promises to be the future of photography, and fortunately, Don Arturo had the opportunity to experiment with it. This was a limited technology of that time, but, thanks to his friendship with his American colleagues he was able to experiment with it.
Another technology in which he participated, although in a limited way, was in sound recording since he had a small part in the production of the 10-inch, 33 1/3 RPM disc that was initially released under the name: “Sounds of San Miguel” in the 50s by Marge and Fred Hillman. Later the rights of the disc were acquired by Lic. Luis Rayas, intimate friend of Don Arturo, and published in the version of 12 inches under the new name: “Imágenes Sonoras de San Miguel.
For many years he had his shop in the street of Mesones and was called “La Casa del Pueblo”. In that store everything was sold except food. Don Arturo liked to say: “here we sell from a needle, to a locomotive” and of course it could not be lacking for a laboratory and photographic material. He was for not less than forty years the distributor of the Kodak Mexicana company in San Miguel de Allende. So, it continued until closing the store and semi-retiring and without stopping, having a study and laboratory in his house in Calle de Jesús # 14. Until his faculties no longer enabled him to do his work. Just a few weeks before his death in 2001, the Instituto Allende celebrated an important anniversary and Don Arturo was recognized, although not in person because he was unable to attend, as one of the founders of that institution. What an honor for him, he served San Miguel well.
Rest in peace, Don Arturo Suárez García.
+52 1 (415) 101 31 30
fotosuarez@outlook.com
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‘Crimes of the Heart’ Probes the Bonds of Family
Lenny, played by Audra Honaker, contemplates life as a spinster as she celebrates her 30th birthday.
STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
PHOTOS BY KIRSTEN SHULTZ
The McGrath sisters are having a bad day. Babe is out on bail after shooting her husband because, she says, she didn’t like the way he looked.
Meg has returned home nearly in a strait jacket after jet setting off to Hollywood to be a singing star.
Attempted murder brings together three sisters played by Audra Honaker, Aly Wepplo and Sharon Barto Gouran.
And Lenny—well, she’s turning 30 with no romantic prospects, having spent adulthood caring for granddaddy.
Of course, the McGrath sisters have a lot of bad days—they have had ever since their father ran off and their mother hung herself and the pet cat.
They all have simmering resentments and bones to pick—and they don’t hold back a single detail. And they all have to figure out how to deal with their personal crimes of the heart in Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tragicomedy “Crimes of the Heart.”
Company of Fools will present what Director Scott Palmer calls “an American classic” Wednesday, June 26, through Saturday, July 13, at The Liberty Theatre in Hailey.
“Crimes of the Heart” was written by Jackson, Miss., native Beth Henley, who won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for her efforts.
The play offered a safe space to talk about domestic violence and mental illness at a time when those subjects were rarely discussed in public.
It’s also a heartfelt exploration of family, making it the perfect choice to open the Company of Fools’ 24th season, which has been given the theme “Welcome to the Family,” said Scott Palmer, who is making his directorial debut with the Fools after becoming the company’s producing artistic director in March 2019.
“It’s set in the 1970s in the wake of Hurricane Camille. And, tragically, the themes in this play feel as relevant today as they did when it premiered,” he added.
Each of the three sisters possesses extreme beauty and grace. It’s just that some things have gotten twisted, said Sharon Barto Gouran, a Wood River Valley native who has returned from Seattle where she now lives to play Meg.
And Barnett Lloyd, the lawyer who has stepped up to defend Babe? Well, he’s there because he’s liked Babe since she stole his heart at a long-ago- church bazaar. And, besides that, he has a personal vendetta to settle with Meg’s husband.
“It shows that good and bad can exist in every human and in every circumstance. It depends on where you’re coming from whether it’s justifiable,” said David Janeski, who plays Lloyd.
Palmer has seen several productions of “Crimes of the Heart,” including the movie version which starred Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard and got three Academy Award nominations. But he wasn’t taken with any of them, he said, as they tried to make it more of a comedy than what he believes it was meant to be.
He hopes his version takes a more authentic tack as it deals with family relationships, with laughs coming not at the characters but because audiences can identify with them.
“It’s steeped in southern heritage, and we are adding a bit of a southern dialect to our speech, as a result,” he said. “But the play is very American. There’s not going to be people that say, ‘That’s not my experience in Idaho.’ This play deals with things like access to mental health care, suicide and affordability and access to legal help. And, I think, audience members will be able to connect to the pain and sisterhood.”
Company of Fools veterans Audra Honaker will play Lenny; Sharon Barto Gouran, Meg; Aly Wepplo, Babe; David Janeski, Barnette and Tess McKenna, Chick. Tim Gouran will make his debut with the Fools as Doc.
Melissa Heller, a professional costume designer from Portland, Ore., who worked with Palmer for more than 10 years and his Bag&Baggage Productions, will has designed the costumes. K.O. Ogilvie is stage manager and Joe Lavigne, scenic designer.
The show is most appropriate for those 13 and older due to adult themes, such as discussions of mental illness and family conflict.
What: “Crimes of the Heart”
When: June 26-July 13, Wednesdays through Saturday, June 26-29; Tuesday and Wednesday July 2-3; Friday and Saturday, July 5-6; Wednesday through Saturday, July 10-13. The play starts at 7;30 p.m. every night except for the special Friday, June 28, “Opening Night,” which starts at 6:45 p.m.
Where: The Liberty Theatre in Hailey
Tickets: $35 for members of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, $40 for nonmembers, $35 for seniors 62 and over, $15 for students with ID, $35 for members of a group of eight or more and $25 for “Second Night 24” adult tickets on June 27.
Wednesday, June 26, is pay What you Feel preview. Wednesday, June 29, is Educator Night with two $15 tickets for educators. It’s also Date Night with a Chat Back and Backstage Tour, plus discounted wine, beer, bubbly, chocolate and a chance to win prizes.
The 10 front-row sets cost $10 each.
Friday, June 28, which features a Pre-Show Lecture and post show reception is sold out.
For tickets call 208-578-9122 or visit www.sunvalleycenter.org.
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"MultiReal" by David Louis Edelman
Rest In Peace, Michael Turner (1971 – 2008)
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"Escapement" by Jay Lake
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"Odd Hours" + "In Odd We Trust" by Dean Koontz
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"Tigerheart" by Peter David w/Bonus Q&A
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"Kushiel's Mercy" by Jacqueline Carey w/Bonus Q&A
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SPOTLIGHT: Books of June 2008
Official Peter David Website
Order “Tigerheart” HERE
Read An Interview with Peter David HERE
Read Reviews via Fresh Fiction, Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review + Sci Fi Weekly
AUTHOR INFORMATION: Peter David is the New York Times bestselling author of more than seventy novels including Star Trek: New Frontier, movie novelizations (Spider-Man, Hulk, Iron Man), and such original works as the Sir Apropos of Nothing fantasy series and “Darkness of the Light”. Peter is also an award-winning comic book writer of The Spectacular Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk and The Gunslinger Born/The Long Road Home (co-writer) prequel mini-series to Stephen King’s famed Dark Tower series, among many other titles. His television credits include scripts for Babylon 5, Crusade and co-creating the Nickelodeon series Space Cases w/Bill Mumy.
PLOT SUMMARY: Paul Dear is a good and clever boy, doted on by a father who fills his son’s head with tall tales, thrilling legends, and talk of fairy-folk, and by a mother who indulges these fantastic stories and tempers them with common sense. But Paul is special in ways that even his adoring parents could never have imagined. For by day, in London’s Kensington Gardens, he walks and talks with the pixies and sprites and other magical creatures that dwell among the living, but are unseen by most. And at night in his room, a boy much like himself, yet not, beckons to Paul from the mirror to come adventuring. It’s a happy life for Paul, made all the more so by the birth of his baby sister.
But everything changes when tragedy strikes, and Paul concludes that there’s only one course of action he can take to dispel the darkness that has entered his home and make things right again. And like countless heroes before him, he knows that he must risk everything to save the day.
Thus begins a quest that will lead Paul down the city’s bustling streets, to a curio shop where a magical ally awaits him, and launches him into the starry skies, bound for a realm where anything is possible. Far from home, he will run with fierce Indian warriors, cross swords with fearsome pirates, befriend a magnificent white tiger, and soar beside an extraordinary, ageless boy who reigns in a boundless world of imagination…
CLASSIFICATION: Like the J.M. Barrie classic that served as inspiration, “Tigerheart” is a Victorian/Edwardian ‘bedtime story’ that is at once charming, whimsical, sentimental, insightful, magical and timeless. Recommended for readers from age ten to one hundred )
FORMAT/INFO: Page count is 290 pages divided over twenty-one ‘titled’ chapters. Narration is a blend of third-person omniscient and first-person with our ‘narrator’ constantly “breaking the fourth wall” and addressing the audience. The narrative itself mainly follows Paul Dear, but occasionally breaks to see what’s going on with The Boy, Gwenny, Fiddlefix and Captain Slash. “Tigerheart” is a standalone novel, but there’s potential for ‘further adventures.’
June 17, 2008 marks the North American Hardcover publication of “Tigerheart” via Del Rey. Cover artwork is provided by Scott McKowen.
ANALYSIS: Whether you’ve read the original J.M. Barrie play or novel, seen the Disney film, eaten the peanut butter, or been exposed to any of the other countless adaptations out there, most people are probably familiar with the tale of Peter Pan and Neverland, and because of this familiarity, readers should be able to immediately connect with Peter David’s “Tigerheart” which is an homage to, an original retelling, and a sequel to the classic bedtime story…
As an homage, “Tigerheart” liberally borrows from J.M. Barrie’s classic including characters, places and themes—names and certain elements have been changed such as The Boy instead of Peter Pan, Anyplace instead of Neverland, Captain Hack for Captain Hook, Vagabonds/Bully Boys in place of The Lost Boys, Fiddlefix for Tinker Bell, Gwenny instead of Wendy, Seirenes in place of mermaids, a sea serpent instead of a crocodile, and so on—and Peter even goes so far as adopting the author’s fanciful narrative style, which is actually one of the book’s most endearing qualities, along with the novel’s ability to appeal to readers of all ages :)
It is as an interpretation though where “Tigerheart” really shines, by telling a story that is fresh, imaginative and enchanting while retaining the whimsical nature and enduring spirit of the original. For starters, Paul Dear, or ‘Tigerheart’ as he will come to be known in the book, is really the star of the story instead of The Boy. What I like about Paul is that he’s like the anti-Peter Pan. Where The Boy is cocky, selfish, fearless, and wants to stay a boy forever, Paul wants to grow up, is modest, and cares more about others than himself. In fact, the whole reason Paul travels to Anyplace is not because of grand adventures and having fun, but because he wants to help his mom, and actually spends most of his time there sacrificing himself for others. Other interesting departures include Captain Slash—Captain Hack’s sister, a fellow pirate and the novel’s main villain—Paul’s best friend, the snow tiger; Noplace; a wonderful subplot involving The Boy’s shadow; and The Boy’s parentage. Also of note is how certain ‘controversy’ was avoided in Peter’s book compared to the original. In other words, there’s violence and one or two bad words in “Tigerheart”, it’s dark at times and deals with some adult issues, but the sexual innuendo has been toned down to virtually nothing and Peter keeps things politically correct :)
CONCLUSION: More often than not, adaptations, reimaginings or sequels rarely live up to the original, but in this case I have to say Peter David’s “Tigerheart” is even better than J.M. Barrie’s “Peter and Wendy.” At least, I enjoyed reading “Tigerheart” more :) In fact, “Tigerheart” is easily one of the most charming novels I’ve ever read and is an instant favorite—the kind of book you just want to read over & over again while sharing the wonderment with as many people as possible…
BONUS FEATURE — Peter David Author Q&A:
Q: June 17, 2008 marks the release of your new book “Tigerheart”, which is a sort of reinterpretation of J.M. Barrie’s classic tale of Peter Pan. Where did the idea for “Tigerheart” originate from, did you have any problems finding a publisher, and why Peter Pan?
Peter: Doing a sequel to Peter Pan had always been something kicking around in my head, and with the characters falling into public domain, this seemed like a good time to pursue it. However, as the story developed, I decided it worked better as pastiche, because it was really more the story of Paul Dear than it was Peter Pan or any of the Barrie characters. And it would have been presumptuous to write a Peter Pan story in which Barrie's cast became supporting players. As for finding a publisher, Betsy was an early and avid supporter of the book, so Del Rey always seemed the first, best home for it.
Q: Editor-in-chief Betsy Mitchell actually compares “Tigerheart” to another classic in The Princess Bride. What do you think of this comparison?
Peter: I'm certainly flattered by it. I have to think that Goldman's novel is in a class by itself, and that rather than comparing it in terms of quality, Betsy was basically saying that if you enjoyed a fairy tale with an off-beat sensibility—which is certainly Princess Bride—then “Tigerheart” will appeal to you for the same reason.
Q: As a whole, how do you feel about the way “Tigerheart” turned out and what do you hope readers will get out of reading the book?
Peter: I'm thrilled with the final product. I think that the process of editorial notes only improved it and the production values are high. It's a beautiful cover. As for the readers, I wrote the book with sufficient levels that I'm hoping different readers have different experiences based upon their age and sophistication. Very young readers will take heart from a boy taking active steps to cope with a family tragedy; older readers will, I hope, enjoy an exciting tale while considering some of the deeper messages about the responsibilities of adulthood, and adults will pick up on the subtleties and satire, and perhaps even consider it a book they can read to their own kids. The personality with which I imbued the narrator certainly lends itself to that.
Q: Now for those that may not be familiar with your work, you’ve also written comic books, movie scripts, television episodes, media tie-ins, nonfiction, manga adaptations, et cetera. Is there any format you haven’t explored yet that you’d like to write in, and why the diversity?
Peter: Pragmatically, the more venues that I explore, the easier it is for me to remain gainfully employed. Also there are certain stories that I come up with that are best told in particular formats. Having familiarity with all such formats allows me to have as many tools in my toolbox as possible.
Q: So what is Peter David most famous for—your comic books, your novels, your original work or your media tie-ins—and what is Peter David best at? For that matter, what do you feel are your strengths—and weaknesses—as a writer?
Peter: I'm probably best known for my Star Trek novels and for my twelve-year run on the Hulk. My strengths lay in dialogue and characterization. In terms of plots, I tend to operate more by the seat of my pants than anything, which means I can sometimes write myself into a corner. But I think this is offset by a freshness and unpredictability in my writing, since I tend to come up with my best ideas on the fly.
Q: Staying on this subject, how do you juggle between your different writing projects and what keeps you motivated?
Peter: Having a variety of projects at any one time is an advantage, because if I'm working on—say—a novel, and I hit a wall, I just flip over and start working on the next issue of “Fallen Angel” or something like that. It helps avoid writer's block or creative fatigue. Motivated? Well, writing is how I earn my living, and the bills don't stop coming if I don't feel like writing, so that's certainly motivation right there. But even if I were independently wealthy, I'd still feel compelled to write. One becomes a writer because NOT becoming a writer really isn't an option.
Q: Going back to your novels, last year Tor released “Darkness of the Light”, Book One of The Hidden Earth. Could you tell us a bit more about the inspiration behind the series, your plans for The Hidden Earth, and how far along you are with the second book?
Peter: The inspiration stemmed from wanting to try my hand at something involving world building and would be a tale of far greater scope than anything I've done before. There will be two more books in the series, but the contract was only just signed, so I've only just begun plotting out the second book. I'm hoping to turn in the first draft before the end of the year.
Q: Are you involved with any other books that you could discuss?
Peter: “Mascot to the Rescue” is a fun young adult novel that is coming out in September from Harpercollins, about a young comic book fan who is so obsessed with a comic book sidekick that he comes to believe that whatever happens to the sidekick will happen to him as well. So when he learns, to his horror, that the character is slated to be killed off, he embarks on a quest to the wilds of Westchester to find the writer/artist of the series and convince him to change his mind.
Q: Interesting :) Moving on to comics, your resume includes The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Captain America, The Punisher, She-Hulk, X-Factor, and so on. Out of everything you’ve worked on so far, what’s been your most memorable experience? What about least memorable?
Peter: In terms of mainstream, probably the Hulk based purely on the longevity of the run. In terms of creator owned, “Fallen Angel” which is published by IDW. “Fallen Angel” has had quite an impressive history, starting at DC and then moving over to IDW. I've had full freedom to do whatever I want on the series, and that's tough to beat. As for least memorable...I can't recall. That's how I know it was unmemorable.
Q: Even as prolific as you are, there are still a ton of comic books that you haven’t worked on yet. Which titles would you be most interested in writing and why? What about artists or other writers that you would like to work with?
Peter: I'd love to write “Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze.” Yes, I know he's a pulp hero, but there have been comic book incarnations as well. And my dream project is to write Tarzan vs. the Phantom. How cool would that be, to write the two major jungle guys? As for who I'd like to work with, I'd love to have the chance to work with Wendy Pini on something. That would be cool. Art Adams would also be exciting.
Q: Do you have any tidbits to share about the properties (She-Hulk, X-Factor) that you’re currently writing and what the future holds for Peter David in comics?
Peter: I'm actually doing a She-Hulk/X-Factor crossover, literally by popular demand. The moment it was announced that I had taken over She-Hulk, fans started asking to see the two books interact. I have new members joining X-Factor (Darwin, Longshot) and She-Hulk becomes romantically involved with Hercules. Lots of fun stuff going on. In terms of future projects, I've just signed a contract with IDW to do a comic book version of my fantasy series, Sir Apropos of Nothing, so that should be fun.
Q: Congratulations on the comic book adaptation of Sir Apropos of Nothing! I think a lot of readers will be interested in that :) So what do you feel are the biggest differences between writing a novel and a comic book? What about the positives/negatives of each format in relation to the other?
Peter: When plotting and writing a comic book, one has to think in visual terms. In a novel, you can have two people talking in a room for twenty pages and, as long as the dialogue is compelling, you'll be fine. Having two people in a room talking for twenty pages of a comic book is, to put it mildly, problematic. Ultimately the upside is that, collaborating with an artist, you can produce something that is greater than either of you could produce individually. The downside is that, to be indelicate, if the artist is lousy, then it doesn't matter how good a story you've written. It will be dragged down. In a novel, there's nothing between you and the audience except your own words. The success or failure of the story is entirely on you.
Q: Speaking of differences, you handled the scripting on Stephen King’s The Dark Tower miniseries. How does that differ from regular comic book writing and what was it like working with the author on the series? Also, will we be seeing any more of The Dark Tower after The Long Road Home is complete?
Peter: It's different for me in that I'm only providing the dialogue, with the plot being done by Robin Furth. Between Robin's doing the story and Jae Lee providing the visual breakdown of the art pages, this is a far more collaborative endeavor than when I'm simply writing a full script and passing it on to the editor. Dark Tower is currently slated to run around thirty issues, taking us through to the battle of Jericho Hill.
Q: Excellent news! Now you’ve actually dabbled in many other established worlds as well including Babylon 5, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and numerous movie novelizations including the Spider-Man series. What are the advantages and disadvantages of writings books/comics in already established universes?
Peter: The advantage is that you're contributing to a vast tapestry, part of something that's bigger than yourself. Plus you're getting your name and your stories out in front of a wider audience who will then, one hopes, follow you back to the work set in worlds of your own creation. The disadvantage is that it's that much more people to tell you what you can do and what you can't.
Q: As far as television and film (Trancers, Babylon 5, Oblivion), you’ve done everything from writing, producing and even acting. What do you think about the biz and are you currently involved in any film/television projects at the moment that you could talk about?
Peter: I have some film and TV stuff in the hopper, but nothing far enough along to discuss. As for show business, there's no business like it I know. The problem is that the money can be fantastic, and you can get your stories out to millions of people in one shot, but creatively it can suck your soul dry.
Q: What about your own creator-owned properties? Is anything in development?
Peter: The most likely for development would be “Fallen Angel”. Unfortunately Warners still owns the dramatic rights, and although a myriad of studios and producers have approached them, Warners won't let anyone else do anything with it...while continuing to fail to do anything themselves.
Q: Well hopefully something will happen with “Fallen Angel” soon, but for now let’s fantasize :) Out of your original work, what would be your dream adaptation?
Peter: “Tigerheart” with script by William Goldman, directed by either Terry Gilliam or Ron Howard, with Kate Winslet in the dual role of the mother and Mary Slash and David Tennant as the father and Captain Hack. We'd need a fresh face for The Boy since the first choice, Freddie Highmore, would be too old for the role by the time the film gets going.
Q: What do you think of the cross-pollination today between different formats such as films, novels, comic books, television, et cetera? Is it getting to the point where it might become more advantageous for writers to have experience in more than one medium?
Peter: I think there's always an advantage for writers to have experience in more than one medium. As for the cross pollination, the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned, as long as the movie and TV guys don't dump their comic book commitments the moment something larger paying comes along.
Q: On a related note, with entertainment becoming more technology-based, which in turn is becoming more advanced, are comic books and novels in any danger of becoming obsolete, and what can publishers & writers/artists do to adjust to the changing times?
Peter: I don't think they're in danger of becoming obsolete. The means of reading them may change, but the need to experience stories goes back to caveman scrawling adventures on walls of their caves. As for adjusting, I think they just have to be open to new opportunities rather than say, “No, that's something I would never get involved with.”
Q: You’ve been involved with comic books and writing novels since the 80s. What are your thoughts on the evolution of comic books and the science fiction/fantasy genres and what the future holds for them?
Peter: There still seem to be too many people who consider comic books to be purely the province of children. The snobbery is so pervasive that, when Neil Gaiman's “Sandman” won the World Fantasy Award for best short story, the rules were changed within twenty four hours to make sure it never happened again. As successful as comic book movies or comics themselves become, there is still some degree of snobbery in how they're regarded, and I don't see that going away anytime soon. I think you're going to see more and more web comics and such, although I couldn't say whether they're ever going to supplant print, I've no idea.
Q: What books/comics have recently impressed you the most, what are you currently reading, and what titles are you most looking forward to?
Peter: I think “Secret Invasion” has been terrific, and I also like Terry Moore's “Echo” as well as Jeff Smith's new title, “RASL.”
Q: Who do you feel is an underrated writer that deserves more attention and why?
Peter: Me. Just because.
Q: Good enough! To conclude, is there anything else you’d like to say to your readers?
Peter: Buy “Tigerheart.” Don't make me hurt you.
daydream said...
You are quite productive in a major way. I can't keep up with you. Hah! Brilliant review and interview! I have aspirations to work in several mediums as well with ideas for comic books and the likes. I have this artist friend and hope to start web comics, but we have problems with finding domain, since we are just so poor. Hah!
Thanks Harry :) Yeah, I think it's cool when writers branch out into different mediums. Web comics would be cool :) Myself, I've always wanted to write movie scripts ;)
No biggie! I would like to be the writer ofa freaky manga series as well, but I have no idea how to propose ideas to the companies taht draw mangas and I doubt it will be that easy.
RobB said...
Good review, mine is up now. Very good interview, too.
I do have to ask, though. Do you sleep at all?
Harry, a manga series sounds like fun, although a lot of the manga I've seen is already pretty freaky in their own ways ;)
Rob, thanks for the heads up! I was wondering when you were going to post your review :) Great stuff as usual! I'm a big fan of Peter's comic book work, but I need to check out his other novels. Will probably start with "Darkness of the Light". As far as sleep, I get enough ;)
ThRiNiDiR said...
This book sounds really endearing; I have to dig up something from Peter David - I'll probably start with his comics. great review, btw.
Uros, well you have a lot to choose from :) Let me know what you decide to read...
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“The Pilo Family Circus” by Will Elliott (Reviewed...
Philip José Farmer — In Memoriam by Fábio Fernand...
“Amberville” by Tim Davys (Reviewed by Robert Thom...
Winners of the T.A. Pratt/Marla Mason and Mark Hen...
“The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume I...
PRESS RELEASE: World-Famous Fantasy Authors & Arti...
“Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer” by Laini Tayl...
“Blood and Ice” by Robert Masello (Reviewed by Rob...
Fantasy Book Critic’s 2008 Review/2009 Preview — M...
“The Accord” by Keith Brooke (Reviewed by Liviu C....
“The Magician's Apprentice” by Trudi Canavan (Revi...
Winners of the David Moody SIGNED “Hater” Giveaway...
“Black Blood” by John Meaney (Reviewed by Robert T...
“Steal Across the Sky” by Nancy Kress (Reviewed by...
“Hardcore” by Andy Remic: Cover Art & Description
Cover for the UK Mass Market Paperback edition of ...
Fantasy Book Critic’s 2008 Review/2009 Preview — D...
“The Ghost's Child” by Sonya Hartnett (Reviewed by...
“Heart of the Ronin” by Travis Heerman (Reviewed b...
“The Other Lands” by David Anthony Durham: Cover A...
NEWS: Stephen Hunt’s “The Rise of the Iron Moon” B...
“Mind Over Ship” by David Marusek (Reviewed by Liv...
“The Manual of Detection” by Jedediah Berry (Revie...
Winners of the David Moody/Hater (ARC) Giveaway!!!...
Winners of the Dan Simmons/Drood!!! Plus Misc. New...
“Wings of Wrath” by C.S. Friedman (Reviewed by Liv...
“The Walls of the Universe” by Paul Melko (Reviewe...
PRESS RELEASE: Tor & Dabel Brothers Announce Wheel...
SPOTLIGHT: Graphic Novels of February 2009
“The Rats and the Ruling Sea” by Robert V.S. Redic...
Winners of the Adrian Tchaikovsky Giveaway!!!
“Hater” by David Moody (Reviewed by Robert Thompso...
“Lamentation” by Ken Scholes w/Bonus Guest Blog (R...
Winners of the Patricia Briggs/Bone Crossed Giveaw...
“Dragonfly Falling” by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Reviewe...
SPOTLIGHT: Books of February 2009
Welcome to the February 2009 edition of Fantasy Book Critic’s monthly Spotlight for Graphic Novels. Previous spotlights are listed at the end of this article. Please note that the following is not a comprehensive list of graphic novels released throughout the month, but rather a list of titles that I’m personally interested in or that I believe readers of speculative fiction might enjoy. Also, please be aware that unless specified all of the releases dates listed are taken from Amazon.com and that readers might be able to find the titles at an earlier date online or at your local comic book store:
“Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son” adapted by Chuck Dixon. Illustrated by Brett Booth. Release Date: February 3, 2009. Published by Del Rey/Dabel Brothers.
In the nineteenth century, Dr. Victor Frankenstein brought his notorious creation to life, but a horrible turn of events forced him to abandon it and slip away from the public eye. Two centuries later, a serial killer is on the loose in New Orleans, gruesomely salvaging body parts from each of his victims, as if trying to assemble a perfect human being.
Detective Carson O’Connor is cool, cynical, and every bit as tough as she looks. Her partner, Michael Maddison, would back her up all the way to Hell itself–-and that just may be where their new case leads. For as they investigate the strange killings, O’Connor and Madison find themselves drawn into a weird underworld of deception and secrets where a man named Victor Helios has created an entire race of perfectly engineered people who are meant to take humankind’s place one day. But something is happening to some of Helios’ creations, and it may be that this bizarre serial killer is the least of the detectives’ worries...
From the masterly pen of New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz, “Frankenstein: Prodigal Son” is a story filled with fast-paced action, gripping horror, and thrilling adventure...
Official Dean Koontz Website
Official Chuck Dixon Website
Official Brett Booth Blog
Order “Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son” HERE
Read A Preview HERE
NOTE: “Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son” is based on the New York Times bestselling novel by Dean Koontz and Kevin J. Anderson. Features an introduction and an additional story in comic form by Dean Koontz. The hardcover collects issues #1-5.
“In the Flesh: Stories” by Koren Shadmi. Release Date: February 3, 2009. Published by Villard. In this stunning debut from visionary graphic novelist Koren Shadmi, stories of sexuality, anxiety, and twenty-something romantic angst combine with gorgeous visuals for a dark and sophisticated vision of the perils of love…
“In the Flesh” feels like a collaboration between David Cronenberg and GhostWorld’s Daniel Clowes: Shadmi uses darkly poetic and rich, absurdist imagery to take us into the dangerous heart of romantic love. In “Antoinette,” a young man becomes obsessed with the girl of his dreams: a gorgeous—but headless—sylph; in “Hunger,” a near-death experience takes away a woman’s will to live and love . . . but awakens in her a dark and insatiable appetite; and in “Radioactive Girl,” a student is destroyed by his love for a young woman whose powerful allure is literally nuclear. In these stories and more, Shadmi has created a haunting gallery of lost souls...
Koren Shadmi was born in Israel, where from his early teens he worked as an illustrator and cartoonist, and served as a graphic designer and illustrator in the Israeli Defense Service. Now a graduate of the School of Visual Arts, Koren’s illustrations have appeared in publications such as Spin, Business Week, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.
Official Koren Shadmi Website
Order “In the Flesh” HERE
“Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter: The First Death” written by Laurell K. Hamilton and Jonathon Green. Illustrated by Wellington Alves. Cover by Brett Booth. Release Date: February 4, 2009.
Her fans have been asking for it; now, Laurell K. Hamilton delivers a look into Anita Blake's past. Written by Laurell K. Hamilton herself, along with Jonathon Green, “The First Death” takes place almost a year before the events being chronicled in “Guilty Pleasures”. Witness the first meeting between Anita and Jean-Claude, Anita's first time inside Guilty Pleasures, her first serial-killer case, and an early encounter with Edward. Prepare to be thrilled by this original story produced especially for comics...
Official Laurell K. Hamilton Website
Order “The First Death” HERE
Read Reviews via Darque Reviews, Flames Rising + SciFiChick
NOTE: “The First Death” collects the two-part mini-series and the “Anita Blake: Guilty Pleasures Handbook”. This is the Trade Paperback Edition. The Hardcover was published in February 2008.
“Batman R.I.P.: Deluxe HC” written by Grant Morrison. Illustrated by Tony Daniel and Sandu Florea. Cover by Alex Ross. Release Date: February 17, 2009. Published by DC Comics. Legendary writer Grant Morrison concocts an unthinkable plot: The death of The Dark Knight...
The troubled life of Bruce Wayne seems to spin out of control when his releationship with the mysterious Jezebel Jet deepens. Soon Bruce Wayne drops out completely, having seemingly become the victim of mental illness and abandoning his Batman identity for a life on the streets of Gotham City. Capitalizing on the fall of their greatest foe, the Club of Villains begin a crime spree through the streets of Gotham that threatens to bring the city to its knees...
This oversized Deluxe Edition collects Batman issues #676-683.
Official Grant Morrison Website
Official Tony Daniel Website
Order “Batman R.I.P.” HERE
“The Savage Sword Of Conan: Volume Five” written by Roy Thomas. Illustrated by Various Artists. Release Date: February 25, 2009. Published by Dark Horse.
In the mid 1970s following the colossal success of Conan the Barbarian, Roy Thomas helped expand the universe of Conan to showcase further stories and the talents of some of the comics industry's best with the equally popular Savage Sword of Conan magazine. Now, for the first time in over thirty years, these primal tales, featuring Robert E. Howard's most popular character, are available in a series of massive trade paperbacks, collecting all Savage Sword Conan stories beginning with issue one.
Volume Five contains some of the most ambitious adaptations of Conan material to date, reprinting the epic battle that leads to Conan becoming the king of Aquilonia in “Conan the Liberator,” the sword-and-sorcery classic “Sword of Skelos,” and the exhilarating “Conan and the Sorcerer.”
Collecting selections from The Savage Sword of Conan the Barbarian issues #49-60, this volume also includes the frontispieces and pinups from each issue, drawn by such amazing talent as Ernie Chan, Carl Potts, and Neal Adams! As a special bonus, you'll find a companion piece to Savage Sword Volume 1's “A Witch Shall Be Born”—a story-that hasn't seen print since its original publication in 1980...
Official Roy Thomas Wikipedia Website
Order “The Savage Sword Of Conan: Volume Five” HERE
“The Roberts” written by Wayne Chinsang. Art & cover by Erik Rose. Release Date: February 11, 2009. Published by Shadowline/Image.
The Boston Strangler and the Zodiac Killer are alive and well, living amongst the old and dying of The Shady Lane Retirement Center. Surrounded by bingo tournaments and tea times, these two notorious serial killers quietly trade ‘war stories’ about their golden years, two seemingly parallel pasts filled with violence and victims. But while friendly on the outside, they're both masters at deception. And when one of them comes clean with a secret, the other struggles internally with his instinct for murder....
“The Roberts” black & white Trade Paperback collects both critically acclaimed 48-page issues, as well as 50 pages of extras, including the author’s never-before-seen personal correspondences with real life serial killers Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson.
Official Wayne Chinsang Blog
Official Erik Rose Website
Order “The Roberts” HERE (TFAW)
Previous Spotlights:
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Of course, we love film here at Flick Picks. But the Academy Awards - not so much. Sure, it's interesting to see what everyone's wearing and all that. But when it comes to the supposed recognition of the year's best in film...it might be better left to group of senile hamsters. Actually, that may not be far from reality. And yet, and yet...the Academy got things tolerably right this year. Hard to quarrel with the Best Picture Oscar going to Tom McCarthy's Spotlight.
Recent DVD releases are highlighted by a couple of other winners at this year's Academy Awards, The Revenant and Son of Saul.
And we complain if we have to scrape some ice off the windshield. Leonardo DiCaprio faces just a bit more wintry adversity in Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's The Revenant. At least loosely based on the travails of frontiersman Hugh Glass in 1823, the Revenant is an odyssey of survival and revenge. DiCaprio plays a trapper mauled by a grizzly and left for dead who struggles to regain his strength and track down the man on whom he hopes to mete revenge. DiCaprio collected his first Best Actor Oscar for his bravura performance and director Innaritu won for the second straight year in the Best Director category. Perhaps the real star of the film is cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, another deserving winner of one of those gold statuettes. We have The Revenant in regular and Blu-ray DVD.
What would you do if a homeless woman parked her van in your driveway and didn't leave for 15 years? If you're English playwright, Alan Bennett (to whom this actually happened), you'd write a play about it. The inimitable Maggie Smith stars as the thorn in the playwright's side in this film adaptation, which is poignant and funny by turns.
Whit Stillman is one of those directors who seems to be a genre unto himself. Stillman's second film, Barcelona has received the Criterion Collection treatment and we now have the deluxe DVD version of this comedy of manners, based somewhat on the director's experience in the city in the early 1980's.
Also new: DESERT FLOWER, LAMB, THE FOREST
Foreign Film
A rightful winner of Best Foreign Language feature at this year's Academy Awards, Son of Saul is yet another of those stories you haven't quite seen before, much as tales about World War II and the Holocaust are perpetually told. Geza Rohrig stars as Saul, a Sonderkommando, a member of a work unit at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. What's particularly unusual about the debut feature of Hungarian director Lazlo Nemes, which won the Grand Prix award at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is the intense point of view, as the camera rarely strays from Saul, whether looking over his shoulder or fixed on the face of the stunned man. Much as a feature film can do so, we are given a sense of the impossible work and choices of the Sonderkommandos. Son of Saul is a striking piece of work.
SILICON VALLEY SEASON TWO
Nerd alert! Season two of this critically-acclaimed HBO series has arrived. Will our young software engineers find success in Silicon Valley? If so, will they get better haircuts? Watch and find out.
Fans of Agatha Christie and whodunnits in general will recognize the title of this miniseries first broadcast on the BBC last December. There might be several deviations from Christie's source novel, but the production received excellent marks from critics. The strong cast is headed by Lindsay Duncan, Charles Dance, Sam Neill and Anna Maxwell Martin.
Also new: EPISODES SEASON FOUR
THE KENNEDY FILMS OF ROBERT DREW & ASSOCIATES
Documentarian Robert Drew, whom some consider the father of cinema verite, was given unprecedented access to John F. Kennedy, from his presidential campaign through his years in the White House. The "Kennedy Films" include short films from the 1960 Wisconsin Primary to the poetic "Faces of November," shot in the days after Kennedy's assassination. We have The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates in a new Criterion Collection edition.
The Revenant The Lady in the Van Son of Saul Academy Awards
Danny Burdett
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The Single Source of Moral and Intellectual Innovation
Filed under: GA — adam @ 6:38 am
The graded, or staggered, model of action I presented in my next to latest post, and which I have elsewhere called “centered ordinality,” can provide us with a model of thinking along with one of morality. If the first sign appeared as a deferral of violence, then every sign appears likewise: not, needless to say, imminent collectively destructive violence as on the originary scene, but whatever would count as self-threatening violence for the thinker. (By “sign,” I mean anything that is taken to produce meaning). Even the most commonplace thoughts and ideas would fit this model—you produce a sign, i.e., you think of something, something occurs to you, as part of a feeling that something would be lost or destroyed otherwise. This is the firstness of thinking, and it doesn’t matter if the sign is original to you in some way or the most tired cliché—it’s doing what it’s doing for you right at that moment. And it’s doing it for you in the plural, even if you’re not directly interacting with others—at the very least it’s the two or several in one each of us is. We’re not the exact same person we were a second ago, if only because the thought we just had mediated the transition from one to another, and we’re always mingled in various ways with everyone else. The kind of panic, or oblivion, or complacency that shuts down thinking is a kind of violence conducted from the outside (the semiotic ecology) and imposed on oneself—if I think beyond this setting something will be unsettled that I’d like to consider settled. It is feeling the imminence of this shutdown as violence that keeps thinking going.
So, you start off thinking against this imminent violence, and it crystallizes in some encounter with another line of thinking (perhaps the line of thinking that led to the panic, oblivion or complacency) from which it must distinguish itself. This is the secondness of thought—its channeling through inherited formations. But, of course, the thinking itself could never have been outside of inherited formations—after all, the thinking must have been done in language, the most inherited of all formations. But thinking in its firstness takes its departure by rerouting what has been inherited back through its originary structure—an expression that has obviously been said by millions of people but was said by this person at this time and place in this way; a prayer you’ve repeated a thousand times but for the first time seemed to be really heard; a phrase in a book that takes on new meaning because it’s referenced by another book, etc. A sign can only be meaningful insofar as it has previously generated meaning, but it can also only be meaningful if it represents a new beginning. The secondness of thought wrenches the sign out of that originary context by imposing on it the weight of all the other, and especially the historically most weighted, contexts. The secondness of thinking makes the sign retroactively predictable.
Predictability is the both the issue and bane of thinking. We are seeing, on the alt-right in particular, a very vigorous defense of stereotypes, and it forces one to realize how stereotyped and complacent anti-stereotyping thinking has become. Of course there are differences between groups, however we might argue over explaining them, and these differences are registered in both commonsensical and more rigorous modes of thought. It has been courageous and liberating for the alt-right to affirm these suppressed truths. The acronym NAXALT (Not All Xs Are Like That) has emerged as a standing mockery of the feebleness of most attempts to “counter” stereotypes. Stereotyping is the highest form of sacrificial thinking: if someone needs to be blamed for some social calamity and excluded or made an example of, the stereotype tells you where to look and allows for no appeal—that is, it will not allow the pursuit to be hindered. We can never be completely outside sacrificial thinking (just saying that stereotyping is sacrificial is itself a kind of stereotyping and therefore sacrificial claim). And we certainly can’t refute it. But it is in the nature of sacrificial thinking and action to initiate chains of events that are unintended by and consume the initiator, because, following the laws of mimesis, invidious distinctions operate virally. You start with a clear distinction between same and other and eventually find yourself possessed by an other within. All we can do to interrupt such chains is lower the threshold of significance: if a particular group has a disproportionate proclivity to commit certain harmful acts, then you can formalize those acts and target the doers rather than the social reserve from which they sally forth. There will then remain the less violent residue of social stigma and marginalization but, first, it’s less violent and, second, from there another lowering of the threshold might be attempted, if the still remaining level of potential violence continues to provoke thought. (But let’s say the group in question is so powerful, self-interested and relentless that it blocks any attempt to formalize and institutionalize—well, then, either that group rules through the hierarchy it has established and will find itself with the same need to contain virality; or, it exploits some weakness in the ruling order and does you the favor of pointing out that weakness so it can be repaired—if you restore the capacity to destroy that group, it will no longer be a dire threat, or even the “same” group.)
Of course, if the lowering is not formalized and institutionalized, the lowering process can destroy itself by putting in place another even more viral distinction (between those who continue to stereotype and those who reject all stereotyping and therefore end up stereotyping their “other” especially virulently). To set yourself against stereotyping as such is to place yourself in opposition to social order and thinking itself. If society is oppressive because of stereotyping, then the deepest, most taken for granted stereotypes must be the most pernicious. You then have to destroy the most obvious things, and get outraged by boys preferring trucks and girls preferring dolls. The attempt to completely abolish sacrifice issues in the gnostic mania of monotheism; a more enduring monotheism keeps noting that whatever order you are trying to protect by conducting sacrifices really derives from another, prior and more permanent order that your sacrifice will violate, even while your sacrifice might defer, make more indirect and mitigating, another more terrible one. The creation of the sign precedes the division of the object and all the sacrifice can do is restore a practice of division that will reset the terms of mimetic rivalry. Sacrifice relieves us of the rigors of deferral by providing everyone with a fair share of the victim. Maybe sometimes we need to relax the rigors of deferral—this is what Philip Rieff called “remissions.”
The lowering of the threshold of significance constitutes a kind of renewal of firstness within secondness, and is accomplished by incorporating thirdness into the thinking process. Thirdness is the recipient and normalization of the interplay of firstness and secondness, founding and institutionalization, but it is also the position of the witness or spectator. The ability to detach yourself sufficiently from ongoing events so as to observe them as an unfolding drama is an originary source of thinking, morality and esthetics. Of course, this means being able to observe yourself, as both actor and observer, and therefore to see yourself falling into predictable roles and patterns. This self-reflexivity represents the extension of firstness into thirdness. The most moral and the most thoughtful position is one wherein you turn yourself into a sign that reveals the panic, oblivion and complacency that suppresses thought and provides a new means of deferring the violence those dispositions evade. This means inventing practices that lower the threshold of significance. The means of such invention are to be found in repetition, which has the effect of taking a sign from firstness through thirdness, as well as continually retrieving its firstness. Nothing has really happened until it has repeated, because the meaning of any sign is predicated upon its iterability. The more you deliberately repeat a sign, the more it is both stripped of meaning and becomes sheer sign, nothing but a way of centering attention. Maybe the most accessible form of repetition is satire, which pretty much anyone can do—repeat a familiar sign in a way that’s believable, recognizably not what it is repeating, distinguished by a stripping away of attributes that protect it from certain kinds of scrutiny. The moral and the intellectual come together in satire: the thing represented is “unconcealed,” and implicitly measured according to some standard of the good. To become a sign is paradoxical, both preempting and accepting vulnerability to satire, oscillating between firstness and thirdness.
A model of thinking is always a model of a disciplinary space. A disciplinary space is organized around a sign oscillating between predictability and novelty—a discipline like sociology comes into being because something unrecognizable had emerged in human groups, something that didn’t fit terms like “community,” “nation,” “polis,” “republic,” “people,” “kingdom,” etc. Genuine disciplinary spaces tend to take shape in the corners of the established, institutionalized ones, through “satirical” repetitions of their founding gestures and concepts. Disciplines are determined to make a few terms, bringing to attention a specific cluster of phenomena, work—they start with the assumption that they will work, and don’t abandon that assumption until something else comes along that might include what has been organized through a broader concept. But it should always be possible to come back to the founding paradox of a discipline—the decision to see everything one way even though everything appears utterly different than that way (if a discipline just reproduced what we already saw and knew, it would be unnecessary). Let’s say we wanted to view the same social situation as one of complete order and as one of complete disorder. We could easily do it, by adding predicates to either order or disorder—what appears to be disorder is really an invisible order, what appears to be order is really moral disorder, etc. If you keep accumulating predicates on both sides, you would get to the point where you could say, looking at this phenomenon, if we’re willing to see this set of predicates as operating hierarchically in this way so as to articulate the substantive, we’re going to see this kind of order; if we’re willing to see this other set of predicates, etc., we’re going to see this kind of disorder. As thinkers in firstness, we should always be on that boundary; as actors and artists in secondness and thirdness we will inevitably be struck by the order or disorder (or uneven combination of both) that actually appears and narrows the world of possibilities. What thinking does is make being struck in this way a starting point for thinking.
(Those familiar with the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce will notice my indebtedness—somewhat distant by now—to his philosophy and semiotics, in particular his categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness. I would note in particular his essay, “On a Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.)
Autocracy Stalks the End of History
Eric Gans’s readiness to put “liberal democracy in question” would have already made his most recent Chronicle of great interest, but his subsequent “supplement” made it absolutely essential to address this discussion. Gans’s recent discussions, even explicit affirmations, of liberal democracy have had the effect of making this mode of government seem far more hideous and grotesque than I would be able to manage myself, until he got to the point of finding no real argument in favor of liberal democracy other than superior economic growth. So, obviously some questioning has been going on, and the ongoing cannibalization of liberal and democratic institutions and norms alike by the left has reached a certain threshold of unacceptability. What is particularly interesting is that Gans is now willing to consider China a genuine, if still to his mind, undesirable, alternative to the liberal West, and this would put originary thinking on new and untried terrain—GA has focused almost exclusively on Western developments, but it seems we may have to start studying Confucianism; it may also be that China represents a vast, untapped market for GA itself. Here’s a good place to get started:
In the absence of political parties and free elections, political debate in authoritarian societies takes place among factions whose pluralism varies inversely in proportion to the strength of the central power. If previous Chinese leaders, wary of repeating the disastrous results of Mao’s later years, have preferred to share power among several factions, Xi’s economic successes appear to have provided him a sufficient basis for a new hegemony, allowing him to acquire near-absolute power, so far at least without the irrationality that characterized the reigns of Mao or Stalin.
Let’s note here the acknowledgement that an “authoritarian system” reliant on playing one faction against another (essentially a more controlled form of divided or insecure power) can transition to a more “autocratic” one, with power centralized in the hands of a single individuals. And that such a transition need not be irrational (i.e., it can be rational). One of the interesting things about discussing autocratic rule is that it’s hard to deny that it is better at some things than liberal and democratic forms of rule; and, once you acknowledge that, it’s hard to deny that it can get better at what it is already competent in, and better at things that have been assumed to be antithetical to that form of rule.
Among the more striking facts of recent history is the ease with which central authorities perpetuate themselves unless toppled from without. Aristotle and Montesquieu described the perilous nature of the tyrant’s role, as illustrated by the oft-assassinated Roman emperors and various examples of “Oriental despotism,” but today’s despots, including Putin and Erdogan, let alone the Kims and the Castros, or for that matter, Saddam and Khadafy before their countries were attacked by Western powers, seem invulnerable to internal overthrow. The crucial difference between them and “strong men” like the Shah or Hosni Mubarak would seem to be greater ruthlessness. But in none of these cases has autocracy provided, as Xi promises to do, superior economic performance in exchange for the loss of political freedom. (Singapore under the late Lee Kuan Yew might be considered an exception, but this city-state can hardly serve as a model for a full-sized country.)
Another relevant difference is that both the Shah and Mubarak were betrayed by their patron and thrown to the wolves. But this certainly is an interesting observation. Attributing survival to ruthlessness seems a bit circular without some independent measure of ruthlessness—otherwise, their survival itself becomes proof of greater ruthlessness. Maybe it’s just that single man rule is just as coherent and “natural” as liberal democracy. Maybe more—it’s been around a lot longer.
The fundamental question is whether such a system can ultimately become more prosperous than our messy old market system. In schematic terms: one market or two? Economic markets in both cases, but in one, the higher-level regulation of the market is imposed by a self-perpetuating central authority rather than in the hands of changing representatives of the electorate.
The one market or two question refers back to Gans’s analysis (recapitulated briefly earlier in this Chronicle) of liberal democracy as comprised of two markets: the economic market, and a political market that allows for a form of collective decision making that elicits, contains and at least in part addresses the resentments generated by the inequalities caused by the economic market.
The crux is whether an authoritarian system can generate greater political efficiency to make up for its diminished economic efficiency, which will presumably be affected by the damage to morale inflicted by thought control. Which obliges us to turn once more to the rise of the victimary in the West and the not-so-soft institutional thought control that it produces, increasingly indoctrinating the young with victimary clichés and taboos and obliging its citizens to salute, in place of the national flag, the idol of “diversity.”
Whether an authoritarian system (but why not “autocratic,” or “absolutist,” since China seems to be closing in on that, and that was the very point of Gans’s discussion leading up to this question?) can generate greater political efficiency is an excellent way to formulate the question, but why presuppose the diminishment of economic efficiency? The reason Gans gives here seems especially weak—it would be very interesting to find a way to compare the collective “morale” of China with Western Europe or the US, and I don’t think anyone would be all that surprised to see the former outperforming the latter in this field. It would seem odd to assume that political efficiency must somehow be at odds with economic efficiency—don’t businesses, scientists and engineers prefer a stable social environment?
Xi’s ambition for “modern socialism” challenges my response to Ryszard Legutko’s ominously ironic assimilation of Western PC to the dogmas of Eastern Euro-Communism (The Demon in Democracy, Encounter, 2016 [2012]; see Chronicle 532): that, à tyrannie égale, at least the West has relatively healthy economies. But leaving the economy aside for the moment, if there is indeed to be tyrannie égale, then the very foundation of liberal democracy on the continued implicit consent of the governed is placed in jeopardy. Grosso modo we may say that the rise of the “alt” versions of right and left reflects this tendency, neither one accepting the traditional gentlemen’s agreement that its opposition will remain “loyal.” Significantly, in contrast to the Old Left, with its high hopes for the Soviet Union, the new alt-left is not at all dependent, nor even terribly interested in the fate of socialism outside its home borders. Its conviction of the inherent evil of “capitalism” is not based on a contrast with an exemplary model, utopian or otherwise, but is fundamentally moralistic. Victimary critique takes the place of every form of structural criticism. Since every practice can be shown to “victimize” in some way or other, we must engage in a constant battle against all of them, with “the end of discrimination” the only ultimate goal.
American society’s ability to deal effectively with victimary extremism has yet to be demonstrated…
This is really the crux—it seems to me that Gans is inching closer to the conclusion that victimary extremism cannot be controlled in America (or the West more generally), in which case exploring the possibilities of other forms of government is essential, even urgent. Gans still sees liberal democracy as the more “ideal” form of government, even if he has been brought to the point of accepting the possibility of settling for second best. But such judgments are inherently unstable—if the second best government can thrive while the best crashes, doesn’t that mean we must reverse our assessment? Gans’s continued hope for a recovery of liberal democracy (and even an ultimate turn in that direction by China itself) must also assume (although he doesn’t take up the point here—but Chronicle #532, referenced above, is a good place to take a look) that the victimary is some parasitic growth upon liberal democracy, perhaps caused by an over-reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust, rather than a (not necessarily the) logical conclusion of liberal democracy itself. As Gans himself acknowledges, liberal democracy has always been to some extent victimary—why should it be surprising that, as the still extant layers of tradition are peeled off one by one, liberal democracy would be revealed to be victimocratic to the core?
Gans persists in seeing “autocracy” (which should mean “self-rule,” shouldn’t it?) as “bad,” even if potentially better in one (albeit crucial) respect than the “good” liberal democracy. But his supplement gives us an opening to examine the question in a rather rich way:
Supplement (October 24, 2017)
Having read this Chronicle, a friend pointed out to me an October 21 piece by Rachel Botsman in Wired magazine entitled “Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens” (http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-credit-score-privacy-invasion), which describes an elaborate rating system that gives everyone a “national trust score,” and that will become the official Chinese basis for all kinds of judgments well beyond financial credit by 2020.
This gave me the idea of a clearer way of comparing Chinese with Western authoritarianism. These scores will definitely put a premium on loyalty to the regime, and, to the extent they are detectable, keep expressions of dissent to a minimum, as well as stigmatizing easily detectable vices such as video games. Certainly a step toward neo-1984. But there is an upside to this reliance on “objective” measures.
China (and Japan, and I imagine, South Korea) admit students to universities based on examination scores. American universities, even where racial criteria are supposedly illegal, as in California (hard to believe that prop. 209 would get the vote of today’s woke electorate) increasingly give out admissions based on “diversity.” There is also increasing pressure to do the same in industrial hiring, and we are constantly asked to lament the “white privilege” of the whites (and Asians) who get most of the good jobs in high-tech industries. So if we can say on the one hand that the West’s freer economy is a plus over the managed economy of socialism even at its most enlightened, and that it’s arguably preferable to be able to express one’s resentments freely rather than whisper them with the shower turned on, the advantage of these freedoms is certainly offset by the dilution of objective criteria in personnel selection. As opposed to the old Soviet dogmas, today’s Chinese dogmas are more methodological than doctrinary, and in contrast to such things as Lysenkoism, they take their science straight (even when taking ours). What this suggests is that the autocratic nature of the society and its repression of dissent bear increasingly on the mechanisms of social control rather than on the specifics of decisions to be made in the economic and technical spheres.
Of course this discussion brackets such things as the Chinese takeover of “territories” in the South China Sea, and its under-the-table encouragement of North Korea, as well as China’s push for economic hegemony in Asia (New Silk Road) and throughout the Southern Hemisphere. But it does allow for an element of objective comparison. As our society becomes more digital-technological, hence farther from the old norm of “labor power” as the rough equivalent of moral equality that inspired Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, meritocratic selection becomes increasingly important—not just to get the “best” people, but to get everyone to strive to be the best. (Which is the major reason why—but don’t let the UC Diversity folks hear you say this—Chinese kids are good at math.)
Conversely, it is precisely the evil of meritocracy (“disparate impact”) that is the focus of the ascriptive victimary thinking that has virtually eliminated all other thought on the Left today.
The Botsman article is a pretty interesting read. Pretty much any autocratic (which is pretty much a synonym for “absolutist”) system with access to advanced electronic technology would ultimately end up employing some version of China’s social credit system—Gans’s emphasis, in comparing China’s autocracy with America’s victimocracy is on the centrality of some notion of objective merit to any social order depending upon advanced technology (you simply need competent engineers, scientists, doctors, teachers, etc., and therefore “competence” must be valued in itself). In fact, insofar as the victimocracy is intrinsically hostile to all objective, non-political measures of merit, Gans seems to be settling the issue right here. But, of course, if autocracy is capable of privileging merit so singlemindedly, it can’t simply be “bad.” In fact, if it can be brought to focus increasingly insistently upon merit, it would get better and perhaps find ways of reducing corruption and grounding its autocracy in something other than Communist Party rule (the continued repetition of inane “socialist” slogans and verbal formulas isn’t very meritorious, is it?).
But what about that social credit system itself? As Botsman points out, it’s really just an extension and centralization of what we already see developing in the West, in which records of all activity are preserved online and in one way or another made available to those institutions that have to “credit” each of us in some way; the most obvious example is our credit score. China wants to add indicators of virtue to the social credit score, by, for example, crediting someone who puts their salary toward a mortgage rather than toward gambling, and to directly reward and punish individuals based on this score. The possibilities here are endless, and would depend upon a discussion of what counts as “virtue,” for which contemporary societies would therefore have to equip themselves: should the citizen who goes to the museum housing acknowledged national art treasures get more points than the one who goes to the latest postmodernist exhibit? Should baseball be ranked above football, or MMA? Staid but informative documentaries over horror movies? Etc. Botsman also raises the question of gaming the system, which the Chinese have apparently gotten quite good at when it comes to standardized testing.
In West, the only available answer is to say, “who’s to say?,” and blather on about privacy, individualism and freedom, while railing against the “surveillance state” and “creeping totalitarianism”—you can write up the debates before they even occur (1984!). It is clear that the autocracy would be capable of hosting a much more robust and mature discussion of questions of value and virtue, however it chooses to organize that discussion. Social credit scores would be determined by algorithms, of course, but this wouldn’t be rule by algorithm—the state, the autocrat, would have to determine what criteria should guide the creation of the algorithms. This would certainly be a learning process for all involved—if the state discovers that its point system with its rewards and punishments makes a large portion of the population economically unviable (by, say, determining that they can’t use banks or public transportation, or would find it impossible to rent a home or find a mate), clearly the algorithms would have to be recalculated. In general, people would orient themselves toward the social credit ranking system, implicitly participating in dialogues over its determinations. (How many social credit points do you get for blogging on ways of improving the social credit algorithms?) Insofar as something like a social credit system creeps into the West (in the usual confused, indecisive, partly apologetic, partly arrogant way), reactionaries could use that creep to point out that if individualism is being replaced by something like an electronic village, it is preferable for that village to be centrally run and governed by a shared conception of virtue. The Chinese should really find a way to transition from Communism to Confucianism, and maybe we should as well.
Mimetic Theory and High-Low v the Middle
Let’s imagine a scene, let’s say an accident on the side of the road: a few people rush to the scene and start helping the victims; if a few more come and there is nothing more for them to do for the victims, they call for help and help keep others from entering the primary scene; then, others come, with nothing much to do, but they serve as witnesses and in case some instrument or specialty must be fetched (a mechanic or doctor; a first aid kit). I think this is the best way to think about social organization, as always centered on specific needs and dangers, and as set up to differentiate people in accord with the role they can best play in meeting those needs and facing those dangers. In the scene presented above, there is a bit of chance and bit of natural difference: it may be that those first on the scene just happened to be closest, while some of those standing around later might have been just as qualified to help. Still these things tend to sort themselves out—someone who happened to be first but is afraid to take responsibility (or is unqualified, which means that he has avoided such situations, and neglected preparing for them, in the past) is likely to slip back into the crowd, while someone among the later arrivals who is willing and qualified to help is likely to present and announce himself.
According to Eric Gans, the first human scene, upon which we can model later ones like that sketched above, is more precisely specified. Here we have a desirable object, presumably some food item, at the center of the not yet human group: these advanced, highly imitative apes, have their appetite for that central object inflamed, made into desire, by the awareness of the desire of all the other members of the group. This intensifying desire overrides the animal pecking order that normally maintains peace within the group—the alpha animal eats first, the beta animal eats when the alpha is finished, and so on. The alpha could never withstand the force of the group as a whole, but animals never “organize” themselves as cooperative, coordinating groups. Now, as all start to rush to the center, the animal hierarchy is abolished. What takes its place, according to the originary hypothesis, is the sign—what Gans calls the “aborted gesture of appropriation.” Think about traditional gestures of greeting, like hand shaking—it’s a way for each side to show it is not holding any weapons. Stretching out your hand with a weapon in it would signal violence; here, the same physical gesture is converted into a renunciation of violence. Think, for that matter, of a threatening gesture (which I doubt anyone does any more), like shaking your fist at someone—by demonstratively withholding the act of violence, you actually provide a space of peace, even if coupled with a warning. The initial sign was the invention and discovery of this “method” of converting violent actions into gestures of deferral. The gesture is likely to be more effective and enduring the more it actually mimics and therefore evokes the violence deferred—when we shake hands now, we don’t do so (in civilized zones, at least) with a sense of the relief that the hand coming towards us isn’t holding a knife—which is what makes the handshake an essentially empty gesture (it’s not good enough to seal a deal any more, that’s for sure).
The car accident seems like a very different scene—there’s no object of desire, and therefore no cause for conflict. Everyone can just focus on helping the victims. But that’s not the case—every human scene has an object of desire and hence contains within it potential conflict. Something goes wrong in the attempt to extricate the victim—wait a minute, whose idea was that!? The rescue effort can turn very quickly into an exercise in blame shifting and power struggles. There must be someone first on the scene in a more primary sense—someone who can command the gestures of deferral needed to prevent those resentments lying right beneath the surface from becoming manifest and distracting from the effort. Maybe everyone involved is good at that—like trained medics would probably be. But that’s the result of the institutionalization and trans-generational transmission of the necessary gestures. Someone, then, had to build and maintain those institutions, and doing so involved an analogous process of deferring the resentments inherent in any collaboration and creating the norms and models of leadership others can inherit.
I’ve explored in a couple of recent posts the problems involved in the process of institutionalization. There’s nothing new here—in one of the commemorations I’ve read recently for the just deceased science fiction and military writer Jerry Pournelle, I’ve heard attributed to Pournelle the observation that in every institution there are those who are concerned with the primary function of the institution, and those concerned with the maintenance of the institution itself. Anyone who has ever worked in any institution knows how true this is, with the exception that plenty of institutions don’t even have anyone concerned with (or cognizant of) its primary function any more. Those concerned with the primary function should be making the most important decisions, but it will be those interested in institutional maintenance who will be most focused on and skilled at getting into the decision making positions. But someone has to be concerned with the maintenance of the institution—those absorbed in its primary function consider much of the work necessary for that maintenance tedious and compromising. (The man of action vs. the bureaucrat is one of popular culture’s favorite tropes—in more fair representations, we are shown that sometimes the bureaucrat is needed to get the man of action out of holes of his own digging.)
If we go back to the simple scene outlined in the beginning, we can see this is a difference between those who are first on the scene, and those who are second—for simplicity’s sake, we can just call them “firsts” and “seconds.” The seconds establish the guardrails around the firsts as the latter do their work, and they make for the “interface” between the firsts and those who gather around the scene (the “thirds”). They will also decide which resources get called for and which get through to the firsts, who are too busy to see to such details. There is no inherent conflict between the firsts, seconds and thirds, but there is the potential for all kinds of conflict. The firsts (and the first among the firsts) should rule, and should be interested in nothing more than enacting all the signs of deferral that have been collected through successive acts of rule. Even defense against external enemies is really a function of enhancing the readiness of the defenders of the community, and the community as a whole, and doing that is a function of eliminating all the distractions caused by desires and resentments, with the most attention dedicated to where it matters most. The seconds should be filtering information coming from below, marshalling resources, and transmitting commands and exhortations from the ruler. And the thirds, the vast majority of the community, should be modeling themselves on and ordering their lives in accord with the hierarchy constitutive of the community. The problem of institutionalization is the problem of the relation between firsts and seconds, or firstness and secondness (since all of us occupy different “ordinal” positions in different settings).
But, of course, sometimes the first is not up to the task—maybe he once was, but no longer is, while being unwilling to cede power, without their being any definitive proof of his unfitness. And once there is a formalized form of firstness, the tradition or mechanism by which someone is placed in that role will sometimes elevate someone unworthy. In such cases, the seconds, who will be the first to notice, start to worry—they may start to think one of them should be in charge (but which one…?); or that they have to exercise power behind the scenes, reducing the person presently in charge, but very likely his successors as well, to a position of dependence. Under such conditions, the right thing to do is to above all preserve the ontology implicit in the originary scene, what some of us call an “absolutist ontology,” which should therefore be inculcated as part of the accumulated signs of deferral bred into the community. We all know that in an emergency, or in any really important situation, no one thinks in terms of democracy—everybody, except for saboteurs, thinks in terms of manning the stations each is best suited to man. But that also means taking the stations each is presently manning, or is accustomed to man, as the default. A reliable indicator of firstness is the ability to revise previous assessments and assignments and to formalize present fitness. If the first is not up to the task, the radical solution of removal must come very far down on the list of remedies—we must first of all carry on as if he is capable, and if the seconds have to lend some support that will go unnoticed and unacknowledged, so be it. (This is itself a form of firstness on their part.) It may even be necessary, after the fact, to narrate events in such a way as to attribute centrality to the designated first. Of course, if removal becomes absolutely necessary for the survival of the community, such practices will make it all the more difficult; this is a good thing, though, and these practices also ensure that any remove and replace actions will be carefully crafted so as to preserve absolutist ontology.
Absolutist ontology is rejected when these practices, these attempts to bring formalized roles and assessed capabilities into closer correspondence, are abandoned and some among the seconds start to exploit the gap between attributed power and actual power of the ruler. If the second’s efforts must sometimes go unacknowledged, the same goes for the first’s dependence on the second, and this can be a lever for increasing that dependence. Then a struggle, partly overt, partly covert, commences, and it is at this point that both parties (or all parties, because the seconds are likely to fall out amongst themselves under these conditions, while the king thereby surrenders his firstness) seek allies, or proxies, among the thirds. The king has been granted power, but he doesn’t really deserve or properly use that power; perhaps he doesn’t really exercise that power, which is in fact wielded by secret, insidious forces. The hierarchy inherent in absolutist ontology can in this case no longer serve as a model for the thirds to use in composing their lives—rather, it is a mere appearance, hiding a reality that the action proposed by one or another of the seconds (or the first himself, turning against what Imperial Energy calls his “essentials”) will unveil. Skepticism, pluralism, and all the rest follow, and here is where HLvM has full sway. What has happened is that mimetic desire, that is, envy of the putative being possessed by the other, which the centuries or even millennia of accumulated deferral has converted into a complex array of signs assigning roles and duties, has now been introduced as a legitimate principle within the community (the king/your lord is keeping something from you, so, therefore, are his supporters, and maybe your neighbor as well)—and once this happens, mimetic desire, corrosive as it is, must become the dominating principle of the community. Then you have institutionalized civil war, and democracy is nothing other than this institutionalization, with voting blocs at most several steps away from dissolving into armed camps. The problem is how to avoid taking sides in this civil war, or at least not just taking sides; the only solution is to find ways of realigning ourselves as firsts, seconds and thirds in as many (and sufficiently visible) ways as possible, and thereby recovering and creating as many gestures of deferral (while marking them as such) as we can.
Power and Digital Order
Eric Gans has a compelling hypothesis regarding the form of our present disorder that I’d like to give more consideration than I have done thus far. Gans has been emphasizing the enormous economic gulf created by the digital economy run by those capable of sophisticated forms of symbolic manipulations, since the reduction of production processes to symbolic manipulation makes all those incapable of such intellectual work essentially economically obsolete. Gans has been connecting this development to the intensification of victimary cultural politics (wherein every “inequality” is reduced to the form of the Nazi-Jew binary), because such victimary politics becomes the only way of compelling some kind of moral reciprocity on the part of the elites. In his most recent Chronicle of Love & Resentment, “Common Sense,” he makes this connection even more forcefully:
To put the binary cultural hypothesis very simply, the more bytes required to organize the material economy, including the entertainment (thank you, Frankfurt School) that painlessly discharges our resentments and satisfies our appetites with fast food and eventually with self-driving cars and AI-enhanced sex robots (in the business section of the September 27 Los Angeles Times: “Silicone sex dolls get an AI makeover. These ‘girls’ will ‘have sensual conversations and tell naughty jokes’”), the fewer bytes needed to maintain cultural solidarity. The Internet is maintained with terabytes of know-how in order to allow people to Tweet the crudest obscenities.
Local versions of this dichotomy are everywhere. At the university, in the embarrassing contrast between highly sophisticated and theory-driven scientific research and near-universal ideological idiocy. Not to speak of GA’s difficulty in obtaining a hearing. For its complexity is based in ideas rather than algorithms, and it thereby falls between the cultural and technical stools. In a world run on big-data-based algorithms, when it comes to exercising the imagination enough to conceive an “originary hypothesis,” the response is one of intellectual panic: how can you speculate without data, on the basis of what you fancy to be our shared intuition? No one really “understands” particle physics or string theory, but these are not things to understand, merely equations to work out. “Cognitive theory” has equations; GA has only imagination, and there is no longer enough of a common symbolic world to allow sharing imaginary constructs as a mode of truth-seeking.
Once we have all become positivist creators and “trainers” of algorithms, we can no longer allow the kind of “gentlemen’s” criteria for success that still existed in my youth, which permitted the less favored both to resent the “caste system” yet be reassured by its authority. Today, all that counts is either knowing the right people, which is not the same as being part of a loosely aristocratic old-boy system, or getting a high score on an exam. For those who don’t know the right people, getting the score is all, whence the reign of disparate impact.
Economic productivity used to require a certain degree of cultural solidarity: bosses, managers and workers needed forms of extended cooperation; the educational and entertainment system had to enforce standardized cultural norms, so as to sustain cross generationally the models of behavior required for an advanced workforce and citizenry. Meanwhile, I just googled to discover the number of Google employees: 72, 053. (A much diminished Ford Motor Company still has 201,000.) The only cultural solidarity needed there is that of the graduates of the top dozen or so universities in the US, perhaps the world. As Gans notes, these elite workers will be able to produce substitutes for the satisfactions previously offered as inducements to participate in cultural reproduction: instead of a wife, increasingly realistic sex bots (will women want these as well?). Soon enough, people will forget what “wives” were. The often cited Morlock vs. Eloi dichotomy is being realized. What to do with all that surplus population?
I want to address Gans’s reference to the reception (not) granted to GA more specifically, but first of all to note (as Gans himself indicates) that this observation holds for social and cultural theory as a whole. Here’s an interesting way to think about this. The linguist Anna Wierzbicka has developed what she calls a “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” comprised of all the words that are common to all the languages in the world. Along with this metalanguage, she has developed a method of translation, using the metalanguage to translate the various otherwise untranslatable concepts constitutive of each language. So, for example, the word “emotion,” which does not translate out of English, can be translated by reducing it to the words “feel” and “think,” which are part of the NSM. Wierzbicka’s method involves composing a series of sentences that are aimed very precisely at bringing out the specific meaning of any word. Now, in describing her method, Wierzbicka says there are essentially two ways of talking about any event: first, one could speak of the outcome or intention as “good” or “bad” (both words in the NSM); second, one could speak of the event as similar to another event. The latter approach opens the way to identifying prototypical events that would distinguish one culture from another and enable us to account for its language as allowing for ever more complex events modeled on while being differentiated from those prototypical ones. So, it is as if what has happened now is the complete collapse of all events into certain prototypical ones, with all of them summarily labeled “bad.” It is really a kind of cultural lobotomy. It may be that for the socially autistic digital elites and their political proxies and protectors, social spaces (the Humanities, entertainment, more and more often sports…) are set aside for the sub-elites drawn from the under-classes to, in lieu of forming “cultural solidarity,” lead their charges in LARPing iconic events (the March on Selma, the liberation of Europe, the Algerian War, etc.) in real time.
GA, of course, has never had a particularly warm reception in the academy, and its emergence almost simultaneously with victimary thinking offers as good an explanation as any. GA is interested not primarily in labeling a particular social or cultural form good or bad, but in understanding it as modeled, however distantly, on an originary scene (the prototype of prototypes) defined by the deferral of collective violence. The implications of such an approach for making sense of inter-group and inter-sex relationships are simply too triggering—GA suppresses altogether the incredibly pleasurable retroactive accusation and self-congratulation that has driven most thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences for quite a while. But it also, as Gans points out in the excerpt above, resists the supposedly more sophisticated and objective data-driven approaches to social order, because they can never ask the question, why is there social order (and therefore “data”) in the first place? The practitioners of such approaches cannot understand the paradoxical question, what must language be in order to be what it is?, because they have no way or initiating a data search or devising an algorithm to address it. But there was language before there was “data,” and language couldn’t have emerged out of some primordial “data-generating” process on the part of exceptionally intelligent organisms that somehow became a collective process—accounting for that “somehow” implicates the sober scientist in silly “just-so stories” and B-movie quality creationist accounts of human origin.
Now, let’s take a look at Gans’s “final reflection”:
No one can dispute that making women wear veils or worse in public, let alone “honor-killing” them for speaking to strange men, does not rank very high on the scale of moral equality. But the White Guilt that tolerates it is not solely motivated by fear of “Islamophobia.” It reflects a guilty distortion of the healthy idea that women’s destiny, whatever else they elect to do, is to bear children; that, in other words, female biology, at least at the present stage of human technology, is still “in service” to the society as a whole. Women are not solely to blame for the West’s low birth rate, but in a world where women are not subordinate to men, ways must be found to encourage couples to reach a replacement level of population as we live ever longer as individuals, unless of course we would prefer to disappear.
However crude and barbaric these archaic customs may be, they are not simply “irrational.” Not everything that one dislikes can be understood as a variant of Nazism. The idea that the subordination of women, or slavery, or even human sacrifice, is simply “evil” does nothing to explain why it has existed, let alone why it has been abolished in societies that can afford to do so. And calling it “scapegoating” is just one more one-bit explanation.
Once you start along this line of thinking, there is no way of telling where it will end. If female biology is still “in service” to the society as a whole, we might discover that a lot of other things are as well. The reason for the virulence of victimary leftism is that they know if the male-female distinction can be institutionalized so as to maximize some social purpose, every other distinction can be as well. Some institutionalizations of these distinctions are abolished by “societies that can afford to do so.” But what is affordable at one point might turn out to be unaffordable after all at some later point; the judgment may even be made that it was never really affordable in the first place, but that reckless, wasteful people had gotten in charge of the social reserves. The “one-bit” thinking might go farther back than anyone thinks—was not liberalism, in fact, the first one-bit political theory (down with kings! Up with the people!)? In that case, maybe it’s not a question of more or less rapidly tearing down social distinctions but of calibrating the ones that exist along with the emergence of new ones. Here, in fact, we have the difference between conservative and reactionary social thought: the conservative wants to make equality safe for the world, whereas the reactionary wants all inequalities recognized and formalized through reciprocal obligations. All that matters is holding the center.
Gans never does propose a way of genuinely countering the victimary, other than a (maybe not so) ambivalent endorsement of Trump’s “common sense,” i.e., open, confrontational, undeterred approach. But more important is the other problem he, along with everyone else so far, leaves unsolved—what to about those who cannot be integrated into the digital order which, through automation, AI and algorithmic programming, is in the process of rendering virtually all means of acquiring virtue not merely degraded or abused but obsolete. At least Gans lays the problem down on the table, with all its moral and ethical perplexities. But maybe the two problems, as Gans seems to intuit, are one. In an overtly hierarchical order, the victimary, which depends upon the liberal’s sense that there’s always some unnoticed inequality he’s about to be called out for, would be impossible. In such an order, it would also be possible to ask, explicitly, what is the best way for humans to live, and how can we provide such a way? For example, what form of property ownership would promote self-sufficiency and authority in men, and devotion to family in women? Perhaps a return to homesteading would be best for some, and a case could be made for this on aesthetic as well as health grounds—a revival of craftsmanship and homegrown and hunted food. Maybe it’s hard for some to resist a smirk here, because homesteading as a “lifestyle choice” seems affected and “postmodern”—real homesteaders did it to survive, whereas this would have something of the Disney park to it. But if enough people turn to it, that would mean it is a question of survival, cultural and maybe physical, if the cities and suburbs become unlivable, or unaffordable for many. Maybe it will become the best way for those who are not rich to prevent obesity. Immigration can be essentially eliminated, and technological developments can be slowed down or even stopped or reversed for some purposes, in some areas—once we habituate ourselves to the sense that technology is a series of decisions, rather than an inexorable force, many things might be possible. There’s no reason to stand in a stupor and stare vacantly as millions of people are displaced by technology. Some as yet unanticipated technological and economic developments may take up some of the slack, but there’s no law saying how much.
But let’s return to Gans’s essay “On the One Medium,” which I discussed a couple of posts back, and which concludes as follows:
We may tentatively conclude that so far, at least, under the reign of the One Medium, if the periphery appears to be doing fine, the center seems to be increasingly less figurable, either as a god or as an artwork. This might be thought to signal the decline of the sacred, with as a result perhaps the impending end of humanity itself. But let us avoid apocalypse. A world where rocks and old furniture have taken the place of the works of the masters as the cultural “replacement” for traditional religion may just find that traditional religion does a better job. Certainly, as David P. Goldman (aka “Spengler”) likes to point out, religious people are greatly overrepresented among those who produce children beyond the replacement level, and who therefore guarantee their participation in future generations.
Religion too may be found on the Internet, and not only serving its more pernicious functions, such as the recruitment of jihadists. Do there exist the equivalent of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in religious services? Or should we rather learn to look at the Internet itself at a given moment as a MOO religious service, where virtual human togetherness replaces the central godhead with the figure of global humanity itself, nameless and figureless, existing by right of its ubiquity alone?
No, I rather think not. But our massive dissolution in the crowd may have for effect our enhanced attraction to the Subject, real or constructed, that we experience in its center: the One God, I AM WHO I AM.
Why would our massive dissolution in the crowd enhance our attraction to the Subject at its center? Because this dissolution presupposes the emergence of a new center. Similarly, the invention and dissemination of alphabetic writing can be causally linked to the emergence of ancient Hebrew monotheism and Greek metaphysics: in abstracting the word from any voice, the word is “anonymized,” seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. This process is itself bound up with both imperial power and the resistance to it, with both the Greek city-states and the Jewish Commonwealth situated on the margins of, and threatened with assimilation to, the great empires of antiquity. Perhaps this too is a high-low vs the middle strategy, with God about as high as one can go, and the realization of justice on earth an open-ended project that can never be considered defeated once and for all. The development of writing from its origins as a bookkeeping device to the broader purposes of cultural transmission also follows the trajectory of the establishment of those empires, with alphabetic writing in particular—writing based on the analysis of speech down to the most elementary individual sounds—making available to the “low” (the general population, or much of it) a technology previously controlled exclusively by the specialized scribes of the empire, who monopolized the very intricate technique of hieroglyphic or syllabic writing.
The internet is not God, and we have become far more aware in recent months of the very direct control the quite visible and well-known masters of the supposedly ultra-liberal technologies exercise over their platforms. But if the invention of monotheism was an imagined high-low alliance, it certainly exceeded whatever political function it never actually performed anyway, at least not for the Jews. The revelation of the one God, I AM WHO (or THAT) I AM, is, we could say, an iteration of the originary scene: God gathers all his people together and speaks to them directly, providing moral dictates that render human sacrifices and God-Emperors irrelevant. Now, this has often been parlayed into various kinds of high-low alliances, rallying one “people” or another against those pretending to mediate between the people and the divine. That won’t stop, but no one can simply invent a new God either. We can counter the more earthly high-low alliance with the permanent one, though, insofar as the monotheistic iteration of the originary scene need mean nothing more than the general possibility of forming congregations around central objects, i.e., disciplines—even organized around rocks and old furniture, which have displaced the works of the masters precisely because the forms and terms of the congregation are more important than the pretext for it. The monotheistic God issued what Philip Rieff called the “absolute imperative,” and we can hear this imperative (to not usurp the center) renewed in the “one medium”: sacral kingship is replaced once and for all by the sovereign restoring the “middle” as the guarantor of the differentiated disciplinary social order for which the one medium is perfectly suited. One doesn’t need to be a believer in anything other than a center that will outlast any other center and will do so because we keep creating and obeying centers in the world that help pare down the sovereign center to its bare minimum while removing all obstructions to its operation.
Power entails, first, occupying the center and, second, using that occupation to direct attention to another center. It’s like a conversation where you first need to get someone to pay attention to you, and then you can get them to pay attention to what you really want them to. In the kind of power we are most used to talking about, political power, you can make people pay attention to you and then attend to what you wish by making them pay a very heavy price if they don’t. But in order to make them pay a heavy price, there must be lots of other people who pay attention to you and will attend to making sure that actual or potential dissident gets his mind right. For a while up the ladder you can make them (e.g., a conscript) pay a heavy price for disobedience as well, and even very powerful people can be brought to heel if isolated, but at a certain point those obeying you (attending to you and to whatever you want them to attend) must have reasons other than fear for doing so. Potential conflicts, perceived to be more destructive than the consequences of obedience itself, are felt to be deferred through respect to the person and/or office. At the very least, then, whoever occupies the place of power must not be generating resentments more uncontrollable than those his presence in power contains. He must, in centering himself, be deferring conflicts by directing attention to a more permanent center, a model of order.
We can say, then, that centering is power. I have pointed out in previous posts (perhaps not for a while, though) that Eric Gans, in what we could call his originary history of humanity, locates the crucial turning point in the emergence of the “Big Man” who seizes the sacred center and becomes in charge of distribution. Up until this point, in small scale, egalitarian, primitive communities, while of course some individuals are more central than others on all occasions, no one has permanent occupancy of the center, access to which is therefore controlled by a vast, sprawling and intricate array of (no doubt erratically enforced) tacit and explicit rules and prohibitions. Once the Big Man emerges, the general possibility of a single individual occupying THE CENTER becomes imaginable; once imaginable, such a possibility can be desired. The ramifications of this social transformation are tremendous—Gans himself traces a line from this transformation to the monotheistic revelations, which essentially forbid the individual from trying, or even desiring, to occupy the center. This doesn’t just mean that no individual should start a rebellion aiming at making himself king—such a prohibition would obviously be trivial, and already covered by the existence and power of the actual king. It means that every individual, king included, should remember that his occupancy implies an ongoing reference to the permanent center.
There are innumerable ways of placing oneself at the center, which is to say substitutions for and imitations of the centrality of sacral kingship. Power is centrality, and power is absolute. Any occupation of the center, then, means absolute power within the space of attention producing that center. Let’s take the apparently most powerless individual—the torture victim. Insofar as a specific response is desired by the torturer, i.e., as long as the torture is not akin to kicking a sack of potatoes, the tortured has the absolute power to satisfy or not the torturer’s desire and to that extent “over” the torturer. Obviously the scope of this power is extremely limited, in space and time, but within those limitations, it is absolute. And, of course, the largest scale power is also limited while being absolute within its sphere—governing is really a matter of retaining absolute power within that sphere while not (or by not) reaching for power outside of it: the sovereign will rule as long as he directs the attention he draws away from the signs that he causes the resentments he contains and towards the permanent center. More important for my purposes here is that we have a means of analyzing any social relationship in these terms, as an interplay of power (the torturer’s power sets the terms of the power of the tortured). We are always taking turns at the center, and we can therefore always desire to prolong our stay there, with there being no a priori limit on how long that stay might be.
All this is prefatory to initiating a dialogue between originary thinking (and absolutism) and Alasdair MacIntyre, maybe the most important moral philosopher of our time, and certainly the most important anti-modern moral philosopher. In his After Virtue, in developing a concept of virtue to counter the incoherence of liberal morality, MacIntyre begins with the concept of “practice”:
Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions to the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended
I consider this notion of a practice very similar to what I have been calling a “discipline.” The practice must be social and cooperative, which is to say it involves shared attention; it is complex, which means it involves a hierarchical articulation of modes of attention, so that one pays attention to one element of the practice in order to direct attention to another, with the result of that act of attention determining the range of possibilities for the next one, and so on. There are standards of excellence, which is to say one could master certain elements of the practice and still be a novice or incompetent in other, higher elements of it: there is a pedagogical, initiatory component. All participants in the practice learn how to judge the practice along with participating in it, creating a shared space which one must enter in order to contribute –there couldn’t be any competent judgment from the outside. If “human powers” and “human conceptions” are “systematically extended,” this seems to me to suggest that a practice has a history to it, with models of excellence that can be studied, imitated and improved upon. It is really a question of increments of deferral, whereby letting some object be and transforming it into an object of contemplation and anthropomorphized presence generates new objects “framed” by that one, ultimately producing a “world” of cooperative relations between activities and objects. For MacIntyre, the practice generates constitutive virtues like integrity, honesty, and fairness—if you want to be the best chess player, you not only wouldn’t want to cheat in chess, but you would want a clean space in which chess competitions can take place without suspicion; also, if you are really motivated by love of the game, you will support institutions that nurture young chess players, you will mentor them, and so on.
MacIntyre goes on to point out that all of virtue can’t be contained in the practice because, for one thing, one might be committed to competing practices, and the basis for choosing between them (say, between excellence in chess and excellence as a father raising a family) can’t be contained within any of the practices themselves. It is here that MacIntyre (drawing heavily upon his recuperation of an Aristotlean ethics) introduces the notion of a telos of the individual life, grounded in the possibility, even necessity, of understanding ourselves in narrative terms. (Here, an understanding of the origin of language and the emergence of discourse, the subject of Eric Gans’s The Origin of Language, would enrich MacIntyre’s account considerably.) The narrative of one’s life as a telos doesn’t so much answer the moral question (practice chess for another hour or come home and tuck in your child…) as it articulates the conflicts between competing goods that are constitutive of a serious life. (Here, MacIntyre relies heavily upon the tragic view of life, as opposed to more philosophical views that believe one can discover the Good and subordinate all other goods to it.) In engaging the practices and searching for the telos of your life (living a life aimed at discovering what is the good life) you become the kind of person who will make mature, moral decisions. Finally, MacIntyre concludes that the narrative of one’s individual telos is always embedded in some tradition, and that part of one’s telos is participating in that tradition and contributing to the work of distinguishing what deserves to survive and be enhanced in it from what should be marginalized or discarded—all in terms of criteria generated within the tradition itself, of course.
I would say that the creation of a narrative form for the individual life is itself a discipline, or practice—so MacIntyre’s lower level concept can be employed at the higher level. The arts and storytelling traditions are all disciplines/practices aimed at providing narrative forms that individuals will then adopt and revise for the dilemmas and conflicts their own trajectory generates. Similarly, the maintenance of tradition is a discipline/practice, with any complex community having its specialists in tradition maintenance but with any healthy community having all of its members become at least competent “amateurs.” We can talk about all this in terms of centering: at each level, from the practice to the telos to the tradition, attention is directed towards something irreducible to the individual: let’s say some model of action (or virtue) distilled through the tradition. Now, what originary thinking can add, and what only a properly anthropological inquiry can add, is an understanding of how all of this is grounded in the fundamental form of sociability, the deferral of violence through representation. A community aiming at the production of excellence (and, therefore, standards and judges of excellence) constructs a system whereby honors are conferred upon someone who occupies the center according to specific rules. The desire for centrality is thereby rerouted through a system that makes it serve the elevation of the community. A Freudian would call this “sublimation,” but originary thinking doesn’t approach practices in that way: more complex, learned forms of attention management avoid the bad, it is true, but while also being a positive good and, more importantly, irreducible to the “evil” deferred.
How you narrate your life, or how you live your life in such a way as to be narrated, therefore involves a practice or discipline of self-centering. You understand that people are looking at you—people are looking at everyone, we are all looking at each other. You act, then, so as to attract attention, but specific kinds of attention. The problem of human centrality is the problem of resentment: the other has taken my place, and the big Other (the sacral king, before being divvied up into God, on the one hand, and the civil authorities, on the other) has allowed this to happen, at the very least by not recognizing and remedying the injury done me. MacIntyre doesn’t have a way of addressing the crisis inherent in this condition. The Western solution to this problem has been through the sacrifice of an exemplary individual who has attracted murderous attention by revealing, let’s say the log in the eye of all those who see a mote in his. But the attention need not be murderous, and better not be if we want sustainable moral practices rather than emergency coups of a center in crisis. A moral life is one lived so as to attract and deflect resentment, ultimately to the benefit even of those possessed of that resentment. Look at how much of social media is consumed with taking down some Big Man (or Woman) or other, someone who has “illegitimately” claimed centrality. You can’t tell people not to do this, because if they weren’t drawn to such encircling, they wouldn’t be people; but you can respond to this resentment in a defusive rather than escalating way.
The most basic way of doing so is to occupy the center the resentment places you in, but in such a way as to show that it is the resentful attention itself that has placed you there. In a sense, you would be counter-mimicking or iterating the resentment directed toward you. Once we have moved past the “pure” scapegoating of the Girardian scene of mimetic crisis, there is always some institutional structure, some practice, that justifies resentment in the form of exclusion, punishment, marginalization or demotion—for example, tweeting that a journalist has “lost his credibility” with his latest story. The bar for what counts as “enough” credibility can always be raised or lowered as convenience dictates. The way to respond to such a charge is to raise the bar for everyone, including oneself along with the hostile tweeter. Of course, how well that will work will depend upon what kind of journalist one has been, what kinds of narratives one has lived one’s life so as to “fit.” So, how credible are you, anonymous tweeter, in determining the credibility of journalists, how credible can any of us be in this medium or elsewhere, where is the final court of appeals for establishing credibility, anyway? In making the accusation, is the tweeter not trying to establish his own credentials for joining the club the target of his accusation should presumably be ousted from? In other words, run “credibility” through the ringer, repeat it over and over again so as to drain it of all use as a portable cliché. Of course, you can do this so as to “discredit” all notions of truth and good faith inquiry and investigation, but it can also be a way of cleansing the words we use to talk about those things—what is it that we are actually talking about when we talk about “credibility”? If you’re a real journalist, participating in a genuine tradition of exploration and exposure for the sake of public knowledge, you welcome the interruption; if not, you will mount a counter-attack to drive the accuser out of the public sphere. And then that will become part of your narratable life, leaving you in the hands or at the mercy of participants in the practice of studying the practice of “journalism.” The result will be what Gans has called “lowering the threshold of significance,” i.e., making things open to notice and meaning-making that previously weren’t, including regarding yourself as the one enabling the lowering. And that’s the most moral practice because it opens new modes of deferral. (What is implies for the practice of governing I will leave to another post.)
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(current)Roland Banny
"It is a smart move to come to HCC"
Keeping busy is not a problem for Harford Community College student Roland Banny, a criminal justice major who plans to complete his AA degree in December. In addition to his studies, Roland has discovered numerous activities at Harford. He serves as an orientation leader, Student Government Association Senator, member of the campus Lions Club, and a Road Scholar in the Soar2Success Program. Roland enjoys attending HCC Fighting Owls basketball and soccer games, working out in the fitness center, and going on College-sponsored trips. “I also like hanging out in the Student Center because it is so much fun,” he said.
Roland says the College is not only very affordable, but also provides a comfortable environment in which to learn and grow. He has found Harford to be an institution that values and respects diversity. “ . . . HCC makes it important for students, faculty, staff, and administrators to understand differences, to interact effectively with others, and to prepare for the globalized world.” He is impressed with all the programs that the College has in place to help students succeed. He noted that HCC serves students at all levels of academic preparedness and that reasonable accommodations are made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform essential functions. Financial aid awards have had a huge impact on him and have helped him progress toward his educational goals. “I am able to take five classes, work two jobs, maintain a 3.75 GPA, and make the Dean’s List. That’s how easy HCC makes it for you.”
He credits the Student Activities staff with bringing him out of his comfort zone (which helped him overcome his shyness) and teaching him how to be a leader. They also provided him with a job as a work-study student in their office. “They all are really good people – very kindhearted.” He also was pleasantly surprised that all of his professors were willing to spend their free time helping him to achieve his goals.
Before he came to HCC, Roland wanted to be a police officer and serve the public. Now that he is an orientation leader and a program aid at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Harford County, he realizes that he enjoys this type of work so much that he would continue doing it for free. He finds touching people’s lives – and reaching out to them in a way that few others would – extremely rewarding.
Roland would recommend Harford to his whole family. “I have been very happy with my experience here.” He says it is a smart move to come to HCC, earn an associate degree, and then attend a four-year institution.
After he graduates from Harford, Roland plans to transfer to a four-year university to pursue a bachelor’s degree in psychology and then hopes to complete a master’s degree in higher education. Roland would like to work in student affairs and services or as a program coordinator/KEYS student facilitator, which is a program designed to help a specific group of students attend and succeed in community college.
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Talks - Three Spiritual Goals of Life and Willpower
Three Spiritual Goals of Life and Willpower
Three goals of life : realization, liberation and merger. Realization means we have a complete experience of the transcendent absolute. We have to realize God many times to achieve liberation. Control is seeing and understanding the patterns of the mind. We can change with willpower. Permeate life with Hindu beliefs. A story about Gurudeva being taught how to use willpower from The Guru Chronicles.
"Preparing for the next steps on the classical yoga path. Moksha freedom from rebirth and vishvagrasa, merging with Siva. You will soon realize that you create the mind in any way that you want, that you are master of your mind. To become master of your mind, you must realize that understanding is fifty percent of control of the mind, and you have to work at it as an accountant would work to balance his books, as a musician has to work to master his instrument."
There are two ideas in one paragraph. So I'm going to go back to the first one. Comment on that first.
In Gurudeva's teachings there's three distinct goals. In English realization, liberation and merger. Three distinct goals and in other teachings they're not so distinct. What's the difference?
Realization is an experience. But just because you have the experience of realization doesn't confer liberation. Realization means we have a complete experience of the transcendent absolute, Parasiva. We have that experience.
Liberation means after we pass on we don't come back. We're free from the cycle of rebirth. Oh it takes lots of realizations to create one liberation. That's the idea. We have to realize God many times in a life time in order at the end of life to achieve liberation. We also have to do something else which is called resolve all our karmas which can be equally challenging. If we have a few karmas left, even though we've realized God many times, we need to be reborn.
Liberation means we end up in the inner worlds. And being in the inner worlds, eventually that leads to merger.
Merger is when the individual soul returns to the primal soul or Siva. The image being the river flowing back into the sea. Once the river flows into the sea there's no way of reclaiming the water that was in the river. It's totally one with the ocean. So that's the eventual goal, merger.
So, we have realization, God realization. We need to achieve that many times. Leading to liberation from rebirth; leading to merger. So we'll reserve the Sanskrit words for another class.
"Understanding is fifty percent of control."
What does that mean? It means seeing the patterns of the mind. Seeing the forest instead of the trees. Not just going through the mind's reactions emotionally and mentally but understanding them. Seeing from an overview. In other words, if certain things upset us, if we don't have an overview we simply become upset by them. And then perhaps, if the upset gets big enough, we lash out and say something unkind to somebody else. So something upset us to the point where we speak unkind words. If we can see that pattern it's called understanding. We're seeing that this particular kind of event upsets us and it's cumulative and that upset builds. And then we release that upset by saying something unkind.
Control is: We can change that. We don't have to say: That's the way I am. This upsets me and I get so upset I just speak out and hurt somebody. That's the way I am. No, it's not the idea. That's the way I was. We can change it by understanding it. Maybe not the first time but by working on it. Seeing that pattern starting to manifest. This is starting to upset us again. I'm about to speak out. If we work with ourselves enough times we can break that pattern cause it's a negative pattern. It's not a pattern we want to keep. There's no benefit in having that habit pattern. That's the idea of "Understanding is fifty percent of control."
"To know yourself is why you are on Earth. You were born to realize the Self. You are not here to make money, to clothe yourself or to entertain yourself. These are incidentals."
Which means it's okay to do that, we want to have clothes, right? Not embarrass others. So these are incidentals that we don't want to make them the primary focus of our life. We need them in order to function. We need, most people need a car in order to function but having the fanciest car is not the primary goal. It's just incidental.
"You are here on this planet to realize the Self God, and the only way to experience Self Realization is to awaken within you a dynamic, indomitable, actinic will. To do this, the steps are: first, find out what and where the willpower is. Everyone has it. Willpower is that quietness within, that serenity that is likened to a light so bright that you cannot see it with the physical eyes. Second, learn to use this actinic will. Begin with little things that you do. Become satisfied with everything that you do. To you, it must be a work of art, even if it is just drying a dish, cleaning a floor or painting a picture. Your work must satisfy you, and if it does not satisfy the inner you one hundred percent, you must use your indomitable willpower and keep striving until it does."
This is a good example of the principle of integration of Hinduism with life. When we first study Hinduism we don't integrate it. Hinduism is over here. It's what we do when we're in the shrine room. It's what we do in the temple and when we leave the shrine room, when we leave the temple, it's just life. It's not a life permeated with Hinduism. That's what we need to learn. That's what we need to teach our kids. How do we permeate our everyday life with our Hindu beliefs? This is an example. We're doing something. We're doing the task anyway. We're drying a dish. Perhaps we're drying a dish and we're just letting our mind wander. Thinking about the past, this and that. And the dish gets dried adequately.
But Gurudeva's saying: No don't do that. Concentrate on what you're doing. Do an excellent job even if it is just drying a dish. So, that idea of doing something and doing it well, even a little better than you have to is one of the aspects of how Gurudeva says to cultivate willpower. The other one is, he says to finish every job that you start. If you finish it, if you start it you finish it. And in doing it you do it well even a little better than you have to. Those two qualities strengthen our willpower just by doing what we're doing. It doesn't require any extra time; it's just integrated with life, that Hindu practice.
"You must become a perfectionist unto yourself, but first decide what your standard for perfection is. You must control the quality of your work. Take on no responsibility that you cannot handle. By doing this, you will find that you have much more control over the physical body and emotions then you ever thought possible. You will begin to demonstrate to yourself your powers of control over material creations, the physical body and the emotions of the instinctive area of the mind. Demonstration comes as you use your indomitable willpower."
Now we have a story, have to read the story cause I haven't memorized the story. Story from "The Guru Chronicles." This is Gurudeva when he first arrived in Colombo working with his catalyst Dayananda. So Buddhist teacher. And due to time constraints I won't explain who Dayananda is.
"I was happy and awed to meet my fourth catalyst on the island of Sri Lanka, a Buddhist. He was a strong, active Sinhalese man dedicated to spiritual awakening and bringing this through in a vitally helpful way to all of humanity. He had been in Ceylonese government and was practical and forceful as a teacher. I studied with him for one year and a half.
"In earlier years, Dayananda attained enlightenment in a cave in Thailand by sitting in the morning, eyes fixed upon the sun, following its travel across the sky all day until it set at night. He practiced under his guru this most difficult sadhana. Then one night while meditating in a cave, the cave turned to brilliant light, and a great being appeared to him, giving him his mission and instructions for his service to the world."
That's pretty good, huh? That's quite a sadhana; he deserves something for that. Imagine sitting all day just watching the sun.
"My fourth catalyst taught me how to use my willpower..."
Well that's how it ties in. We were just talking about willpower, right? So this is a charming story about Gurudeva being taught how to use willpower.
"... how to get things done in the material world. He was a real father to me. I needed this at twenty-one years of age. I wanted to meditate, but he wanted me to work to help the village people in reconstructing the rural areas. He assigned me to do different duties, sometimes several at a time, which I had to work out from within myself. One was seeing that a new village bridge was put up that had been washed out in a flood, bringing into another village modern saws and carpentry equipment to replace traditional tools used in building furniture."
Imagine if you were given that assignment when you're 21 years old. Go out and get all the carpenters to replace their hand saws with electric saws. When you finish come back and let me know. Well that's what he was told. That's pretty challenging. Which is part of the guru shishya relationship is the guru needs to challenge the shishya. It's also true for parents; they need to challenge their older children. Gives them something that stretches their ability. Something a little more difficult to do than they've done before. And what happens? Your willpower increases.
"I had to take a survey of all the carpenters using handsaws on the west coast of Sri Lanka. I went around with a notebook and listed all their names and addresses and the types of saws they were using, for my assignment was to see that they all would eventually be provided with electric saws. Getting modern equipment into the Moratuwa area was one of the biggest assignments I had ever had, and I had no idea how to begin, for I had never done anything of this nature in my life. Occasionally my catalyst would ask, 'Well, have they gotten their saws yet?' All I could say was, 'Well, I'm working on it.'
"Executing governmental changes was strange to me. My life had been quiet, with no exposure to methods of business. But even worse, I was in a foreign country that had different customs, subtle ways of relating and suggesting. Most of the educated could speak English beautifully. In the villages, however, only the native languages, Sinhalese and Tamil, were spoken and understood. The craftsmen were accustomed to the old ways, their fathers' ways, of making furniture, and were not easily persuaded that electric saws would improve their work. Some had grown up in remote regions where there was no electricity, no running water. So naturally they resisted such a massive change. They made good, sturdy furniture already. Why complicate life further, they must have thought.
"My natural shyness was the biggest barrier though."
(Imagine Gurudeva shy? Shy at age 21.)
"My natural shyness was the biggest barrier though. I had to interview people, do research and convince people of the practicality of electric equipment. Finally, it unfolded to me from the inside how to go about it. I drew up an elaborate proposal, long and wordy, with myriad details, diagrams, names and addresses. I gave it to my catalyst. He was pleased and said, 'Now what I want you to do is take this fine proposal to the head of the Department of Rural Reconstruction. You give it to him, and I will do the rest. But while you are in his office, sit down with him and tell him how fast work is done in your country by using modern equipment to make furniture.'
"I was happy. At last I had something definite to do that would bring this project to a successful end. I went into Colombo to the Office of Rural Reconstruction and presented the proposal. The government was convinced, and not many months later the modern electric saw became available and popular in the villages for any carpenter who needed one. Sri Lanka had just that year received its independent dominion status from the Crown, and there was a lot to do to bring the rural areas up to better standards. I did my part in the best way I knew how and was glad to do it. One assignment like this after another was given to me. This fourth catalyst of mine worked on the philosophy that you do what you're told. If you are given an assignment, do it to perfection. Finish it. And don't come back with excuses. If he sent you on a mission, you wouldn't dare return until you had completed that mission, not to your satisfaction but to his. He might have nothing more to do with you if you failed. I knew that, so I was very, very careful. Inside myself, as I struggled to do tasks that seemed impossible, I could hear him saying, 'Don't fail, don't fall short. You create the obstacles. You can overcome anything, do anything, be anything.' He challenged me to work problems out from within myself, offering little advice and often assigning a task and then just leaving.
"He was quick to point out my mistakes, even though he knew I was sensitive and couldn't stand being scolded."
(Again it's interesting to visualize Gurudeva not being able to stand being scolded.)
"Still, he scolded and criticized harshly. This was good for me, and I am still thankful for his direct and powerful ways. He made me use my own inner intelligence to complete each assignment, and most of them were of a worldly nature. At this time in my life that is exactly what I needed, to strengthen the outer shell, to learn to accomplish duties in the world. It was invaluable in later years."
Aum Namah Sivaya
[End of transcript.]
willlpower
You have only to quiet all things of the mind to realize your identity with the eternity of God Siva, the Spirit, the eternal Self within you.
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Timur Perlin stops indeed at 3FM
Timur Perlin stops indeed if radiodj at 3FM radio. The dj let Wednesday know not only to stop at the station, but with radio.
“It is true, I must unfortunately announce that I’m going to stop at 3FM and radiomaken,” said the 40-year-old Perlin Wednesday in his radio Superradio at 3FM radio.
The radiodj confirming news from The Telegraph. The newspaper wrote Tuesday night all that Perlin of the plan would be to stop at the radio station. At the latest in 2017 will stop the radio show officially, but a date is not known.
“After eight years I wanted something new with my life, but I couldn’t really find anything. Last summer I was a month off and I noticed how nice it was to have a moment with nothing to do. So that I go the coming year. I’m a little bit of fiddling, nothing to do. See if you don’t do anything to be happy too,” said Perlin.
His radio show at 3FM is, according to Perlin, the “best program” what he has ever made. Ramon Verkoeijen, with whom he made his daily program makes goes by at the 3FM radio station. With the transmitter he is talking about a new radio show.
In 2008 got the radiodj his first own program on the 3FM radio station. In his radio program he introduced, among other Mommy apple Juice, a part in which English texts in foreign language songs.
In 2011, did Perlin as one of the three dj’s to Serious Request. Together with Coen Swijnenberg, Gerard Ekdom he was then locked up in the Glass House to collect money for the Red Cross.
Twenty deaths due to flood Indonesia
Timur Perlin stop indeed at 3FM
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Pakistan arrests mastermind of bloody terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008
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WHATEVER IT TAKES / JOHN MAULDIN´S WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
| Etiquetas: Economics, Europe Economic and Political, Greece, World Economic And Political
Lord Melchett: “Farewell, Blackadder [hands him a parchment]. The foremost cartographers of the land have prepared this for you; it's a map of the area that you'll be traversing. [Blackadder opens it up and sees it is blank] They'll be very grateful if you could just fill it in as you go along. Bye-bye.”
– From the English comedy series Blackadder (Part 2, Episode 3)
Was it only a few years ago I visited the Emerald Isle of Ireland? So recently had this fair land come to such a sad state. The collapse of its largest banks foreshadowed the demise of many other European banks that had borrowed money from British, German, and other European banks to lend against homes and property. The Irish government had to guarantee deposits and bond holders in order to prevent a bank run. I think I am correct when I state that the Central Bank of Ireland was the first central bank to avail itself of large-scale use of the Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) provision of the European Central Bank. This was before we became so familiar with the process in Greece.
The Irish banks had lost a combined €100 billion, borrowed largely from other European banks, which would also have incurred great losses had the Irish government not stepped in. You have to remember that this was before Greece and Spain needed assistance, although as Ireland stepped up to the table, the acronym “PIIGS” was coming into vogue; and some of us were writing about the debt problems that plagued Greece and other peripheral countries. The European Union compelled the Irish government to bail out its banks, and so the Central Bank of Ireland took on the debt (via the ELA) of the six main Irish banks that had failed because of the property bubble.
In the “bailout,” Ireland received €67.5 billion (and in addition borrowed another €17.5 billion from its pension and cash accounts), which it pledged with a promissory note to pay back. The public was quite upset, and the government was then overwhelmingly rejected at the polls, in a clear show of sentiment demonstrating that the Irish people did not view that bank debt as something that should be on the public balance sheet.
Government workers had to take large pay and pension cuts and government services were cut, as one of the conditions for getting the money was significant austerity. This was before “austerity” became a bad word in Europe. Meanwhile, unemployment rose from 4% to 14%.
I visited Ireland after the new government took over. I met with some two dozen business leaders, politicians of all persuasions, journalists, and economists. I remarked at the time that the only thing they agreed upon was that Ireland would never pay that bailout money back. A former prime minister told me that they would not have to openly repudiate the debt, but rather were expecting, after Greece and other countries were allowed to default, to be invited not to pay it.
A leading Irish economist who was at the negotiating table told me point-blank that the IMF negotiator told them they would not have to pay it back. But you have to remember that at the time there was true panic and no road map for dealing with such a crisis. Something had to be done.
That something was the issuance of bailout funds (which conveniently minimized losses at said German, French, and British banks), which came with a private assurance to Irish leaders that whatever was done for other countries would be available to them as well. “But please, just work with us right now?”
So the Irish, as we say in Texas, took one for the European team. The blow left a rather ugly scar, as the national debt ballooned into impossible-to-manage territory, crippling the national government.
But there was one group in Ireland that was aghast – horrified – at the idea of not paying back that debt: those were the people I met at the Central Bank of Ireland. And they did have a point. The document that created the European Central Bank did not allow a national central bank to not pay its debts. Governments could default (as we learned with Greece), but not national central banks. Those were the rules that everyone who adopted the euro played by.
At the time, I wrote that the Irish would not pay that debt. I had listened to the 99% of the people who told me so. Silly me. Yet, the last two weeks have seen the Irish convert their promissory note into government debt and agree to sell bonds. So it looks like the Irish will pay after all.
Except that when you read the details, the Irish (after a great deal of controversy ensues) will end up either not actually paying or not paying anything close to the value of what they borrowed. So how can they both pay and not pay? That is the topic for this week’s letter; and an instructive reading it is, not for what it tells us about Ireland but for what it tells us about the EU, the eurozone, and the future of the euro.
Who’s Got the Map?
Fans of British comedy will recall fondly the early-‘80s series Blackadder, originally about a self-serving courtier of Queen Elizabeth (played by Rowan Atkinson, who later became known in the US for his role as Mr. Bean). At one point, Blackadder is compelled to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in order to remain in the Queen’s good graces. The voyage seems, of course, like a death sentence, and Blackadder never intends to sail. His nemesis, Lord Melchett, offers him a map and voices the lines quoted at the beginning of this letter.
The map is a blank page. “It’s a map of the area that you’ll be traversing. They’ll be very grateful if you could just fill it in as you go along. Bye-bye.”
The document that created the eurozone is right along the same lines. Everyone thought they knew what it meant, or at least the Germans did. The Bundesbank (the German central bank) was quite sure that it prevented monetization of debt. It said so right there in Article 123. But the EU and the ECB (with their faithful companion the IMF) seem to be constantly wandering off into uncharted territory.
Banking, credit, and sovereign debt crises seem to require legal maneuvering that was not explicitly detailed in advance. As the rest of Europe looks on, the ECB draws in lines on the map as it goes along.
Article 123, as every good Bundesbank member will tell you, explicitly says there will be no debt monetization. But it turns out that while everyone agrees that monetization of national debts is a bad thing, the definition of monetization is not as clear to much of the rest of Europe as it is to the good German burghers.
Wolfgang Münchau writes rather merrily about the recent “rescheduling” of Irish debt:
Everybody seemed to be talking about monetary financing of debt last week – the ultimate taboo in monetary policy. And hidden behind a veil of unbelievable complexity, the eurozone may have done just that.
Various European central bankers rushed to proclaim that the agreed rescheduling of Ireland’s so-called promissory notes would not set a precedent for sovereign debt laundering. In legal terms, the agreement is probably watertight. It may be a borderline issue, but who cares? In economic terms, the situation is much clearer. This is monetary financing in all but name – and a jolly good thing it is too. (The Financial Times).
All this can get quite complicated (trust me). But it essentially boils down to this: Anglo-Irish Bank was bankrupt. The Irish government had to come up with some type of collateral that it could hand to what was in essence a bankruptcy trustee in order to be able to borrow at the ELA (Emergency Liquidity Assistance, sometimes referred to as “Lending Assistance”). The government gave the trustee a promissory note that was supposed to be paid off rather quickly (in ten years). It quickly became a large financial burden for Ireland’s government – and a very sticky political problem. Only an Irish central banker could love that debt.
But someone in Ireland came up with a very creative solution. They turned that 10-year note into 25- to 40-year bonds. The interest that the government pays on the bonds to the Central Bank of Ireland goes right back to the government. Münchau is right: this is monetization in all but name.
But there is a small fig leaf that keeps it from being outright monetization: the CBI agreed to sell the bonds into the marketplace over time, as the situation dictates. From the Irish Department of Finance press release:
The Central Bank of Ireland will sell the bonds but only where such a sale is not disruptive to financial stability. They have however undertaken that minimum of bonds will be sold in accordance with the following schedule: to end 2014 (€0.5bn), 2015-2018 (€0.5bn p.a.), 2019-2023 (€1bn p.a.), 2024 and after (€2bn p.a.).
Let’s put that in context. Ireland issued €2.5 billion in 5-year bonds last month, which are now yielding 2.8%, less than Italy’s corresponding bonds. That is also less than the 5.9% the Irish paid last summer when they first came back to the market. (Someone made a rather large profit on those bonds!) The bank deal has evidently reduced the cost of Irish bonds for the government.
They expect to raise about €10 billion this year. Right now, issuing another €0.5 billion in bonds is rather easy for them. Granted, the government has to pay the interest to what will be private bond holders, but that is far less than they were paying.
By switching to lower-interest-rate bonds and stretching out the burden of repayments over four decades, Ireland will save itself €20 billion ($26.78 billion) over the next decade and free up €1 billion for future budgets. Goodbody Chief Economist Dermot O’Leary was kind enough to send me a private client letter that shows what a large help this move will be to the Irish government. It gives them a much better chance to actually reduce their deficit to a European-standard 3% within the agreed-upon 2015 time frame. O’Leary thinks they will do even better.
The Irish ran their plan by the ECB staff before they announced this. I was told that initially they did not offer a specific schedule for selling the bonds, but the ECB (the Germans?) required at least a token schedule.
So, the Irish will pay those bonds back. Kind of. Perhaps. I say “kind of” for several reasons:
1. Think back 40 years to the US in 1973. Want a 1973 dollar? It’s worth about 19 cents today. How about an Irish punt? An Italian lira? 25-40 years is a long time. And given that the ECB is going to have to print massive amounts of euros to hold the eurozone together, the betting is that when the Irish do pay that debt, it will be in a euro (or successor currency) that costs far less in terms of nominal GDP or buying power.
2. There is a reasonable chance that at some point the European Union, or at least the eurozone, will move to something close to the mutualization of debt and fiscal union. Debt that grew out of the crisis would seem to be a likely prospect for debt mutualization. This would reduce that burden of that debt.
Of course, it would bring in other debt, but that’s what the long term and central banks are for – or so the logic will go. I most definitely do not agree with that world view, but I will not likely be asked my opinion. In any case, the Irish debt will be so small relative to Spanish and Italian and French(!) debt that it will be considered a rounding error.
3. In the short and the long terms, this is a good deal for Ireland. Those who say the debt should be repudiated altogether would seemingly vote to withdraw from the euro. The time to reject the debt was at the beginning, and they should have. If German, French, and British banks lent money to Irish banks to invest in Irish property, then they deserve the fruits of their investment prowess (or lack thereof), not a taxpayer bailout.
4. Greece and Spain have also gone to the ELA, as have many European countries and banks. At some point, the eurozone is going to have to create some sort of banking union, as much as the Germans do not want to. There is the potential for these ELA loans to be considered banking-related losses. That is part of the negotiation process. Who knows what will happen, so why not cut your expenses in the short run, because the long run may make the whole thing go away.
Monetization – A Rose by Any Other Name
“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet…”
There are those who oppose this Irish move. Jens Weidmann, the president of the Bundesbank, has been especially critical. But then, what would you expect? There is a genetic predisposition in Germany against monetizing debt, and has been since at least 1924. And make no mistake, this is monetization, no matter how much legal perfume you slather on it.
Quoting Münchau again:
This is monetary financing for all intents and purposes. The whole structure of this agreement is so convoluted that newspapers do not report all the relevant details. As always, convolution has a purpose. It renders legal what would otherwise not be, and it allows for obfuscation.
In this case, the purpose of obfuscation would be to hide what would otherwise be a contradictory message. You cannot admit publicly in the creditor countries that monetary financing is taking place – this is sacrilege. But then this is what it takes to save Ireland from a debt trap. It was then considered the best strategy to put back the debt repayment by a generation or two.
I am marginally encouraged by this, not so much because I believe that monetising is a good thing in principle, which I do not. What encourages me is that I can see this as one of several components of an ultimate solution of the eurozone crisis. Without some form of arbitrage between debtors and creditors, this would be hard to achieve.
I wrote at least three or four years ago that if you are going to keep the eurozone together, there will have to be monetization. It is going to take trillions of euros, whether they are monetized or in the form of extended debt – or however you care to characterize them – to solve this puzzle. And the only entity that has that type of money is a central bank, in this case the European Central Bank.
Super Mario: Whatever It Takes
You have to give Mario Draghi, European Central Bank president, high marks on your central-banker scorecard for style and creativity. Following hard on the heels of the bland Frenchman, Jean Claude Trichet, Super Mario has pushed the ECB to the point where it is, for want of a better word, central to the European enterprise. In July of last year, with the eurozone in crisis, he stood up in London right before the Olympics opened and stated (now famously):
Within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.
The Financial Times named him Man of the Year for 2012.
While I am told that the Irish came up with the plan to monetize the debt (excuse me, I mean to magically change an Irish government promise into German and French [and other eurozone] money; not exactly the same as monetization if you look at it in the right way, perhaps aided by a pint or three or four of Guinness), Draghi had to have approved it. And rather than saying he appreciated the creativity involved, he simply said that the ECB had unanimously decided to “take note” of the Irish actions, whatever that means. “There isn’t any decision [to back the Irish debt swap] today. We simply took note,” he said. I guess €28 billion isn’t enough to officially mess with; you simply take note of it.
The Financial Times reports today that the ECB, rather than giving formal approval, wants to be able to pressure the CBI to actually sell those bonds; and it also gives the ECB some negotiating room with other national central banks, which will want to make similar moves.
The New Policy Implications of the Irish Deal
The ECB is going to need that room. Part of the controversy of the Irish deal is that senior secured creditors of banks are potentially going to lose money. This may represent new EU and ECB policy. That part of the map is not yet clear. Sovereign debt holders have lost money in Greece and will lose more in Spain (unless the ECB gets creative again). Predictably, those most critical are the ones losing money.
Some think that Draghi’s recent comments mean the Irish deal will be reexamined. I can see where that might make political sense (to pretend to address concerns, etc.), but taking back this deal would create a major storm in Ireland. The bank debt is a deep wound, and the salve is a reduction in government costs. Taking away that salve is likely to create all sorts of voter backlash and possibly lead to a Sinn Fein government that would want to repudiate the debt outright.
Greece and Cyprus have to be watching very closely. As I wrote a few weeks ago, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in Greece told me that the money they are being loaned to recapitalize the banks will not be repaid, because Greece does not have the financial ability to do so.
Ireland was in the same spot, and with this magic they have changed the equation. Will the same deal be available to Greece in the future, if they keep on jumping through hurdles?
Cyprus will likely have a new pro-bailout government in a few weeks and will have to negotiate a €17 billion bailout from the EU and IMF – that’s for a country with a population of 545,000, so about $40,000 per man, woman, and child of mostly new debt, taking their debt-to-GDP ratio up to 145%. A family of four will have to pay $10,000 a year (at 6.5% interest) just to cover the new debt. On top of the old debt. Where can a country get such income and remain competitive?
Will there be another haircut on European government debt? Someone somewhere is going to have to lose some money on this deal. Again, the Irish deal opens the way for a new brand of creative thinking in Europe on old debt.
Currency Skirmishes
I continue to think the euro is going to parity with the dollar over time. The ECB in conjunction with its various national banks is going to have to monetize and print (or we can call it by its polite name, “quantitative easing”) to an even greater extent than the US Fed. Along with the money gushing from the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England, there are going to be sums injected into the global system that simply cannot be comprehended. And all this easing will force developing nations to compete at the printing press.
The recent G20 meeting basically said, “It is OK to print as long as you are doing it to stimulate your economy and not to devalue your currency. And for heaven’s sake, don’t talk about it. Shut up already!”
That’s a loose interpretation, I admit. But read Super Mario’s statement about the G20 meeting, and you make the call:
Most of the exchange rate movements that we have seen were not explicitly targeted; they were the result of domestic macro-economic policies meant to boost the economy… [and] In this sense, I find really excessive any language referring to currency wars… [but] What I did say at the G20 in Moscow, I urged all parties to (exercise) very, very strong verbal discipline.
In an article titled “G-20 Moves Toward Common Ground on Currencies,” the Wall Street Journal reported:
… there was more agreement on the need for market based exchange rate and [the G-20] pledged Saturday to refrain from targeting their currency policies to gain a competitive trading advantage….
Germany's central bank president, Jens Weidmann, said it was clear at the meeting that G-20 members agreed that “politically driven devaluations can't sustainably improve competitiveness, don't solve structural problems and produce backlash reactions….”
“The understanding in this meeting was clearly that without going to extremes, developed countries will do what it takes to stimulate their economies, and developing countries—again without going to extremes – will do what it takes to protect themselves from hot-money inflows,” said a senior official at a developing-country government that is part of the G-20.
We have not yet seen real currency wars. What we see today are mere skirmishes in what is shaping up to be a brutal battle to simply maintain a competitive stance.
I should note – as I almost hit the send button – that Ian Bremmer (who will be speaking at my conference in May) sent me a recent note about currency wars. He argues that Europe and China do not want to get involved in a currency war and that many emerging nations would also rather not. His argument makes sense, as a currency war is kind of like having an old-fashioned gunfight, except with hand grenades – there are no winners.
China will continue to allow its currency to appreciate slowly, for at least a few years. I can see Bremmer’s argument with regard to Europe, in that they would really like to focus on inflation and the ECB would like to be a proper central bank; but Draghi’s words keeps ringing in my ears: “… whatever it takes to preserve the euro.” And what it takes may be money printing and a little inflation. We will get lip service, but the presses will run.
Korea? Taiwan? They have to compete with Japan. And the rest of Asia has to compete with all three. Can Brazil, Australia, and the other commodity-intensive countries allow their currencies to be priced out of the markets, thus weakening their economies? I think self-interest will trump all. This is the problem of the commons writ large.
Toxic Debt Scare
Finally, while researching this letter I came across the following post written by Colm McCarthy. I find it hilarious (by the standards of economics humor), and I hereby pass a few paragraphs along for your enjoyment. (For the young and those for whom English is a second language, a “knacker” is a person engaged in the trade of rendering animals that have died on farms and are unfit for human consumption.)
Teams of economists have detected traces of bank-debt DNA in samples of Irish sovereign debt in portfolios all over Europe. Genuine Irish sovereign debt is believed safe for humans but bank debt is toxic. The economists believe that as much as 30% of all Irish sovereign debt is not genuine. The source of the contamination appears to be a premises in Frankfurt, Germany.
The contamination dates from 2010, when a sovereign debt knackering plant was run from the premises by a Monsieur Trichet, a French national. It is alleged that he gathered up large quantities of toxic bank debt and mixed it up with genuine sovereign debt in the middle of the night, when nobody was looking.
There is no licensing or supervision of sovereign debt knackerers at European level and it is understood that the Frankfurt plant was staffed by people with no previous experience in the trade.
Genuine debt from several other European countries was processed through the Frankfurt plant in 2010 and 2011 and may also have been infected. The plant, which claims to be the only sovereign debt processing facility in Europe, is now run by a Signor Draghi, an Italian. Monsieur Trichet has retired from sovereign debt knackering and has commenced a new career in the aviation business.
The Irish Department of Finance has been seeking to return the infected sovereign debt to the Frankfurt plant with a view to removing the toxic component. They are afraid that retailers might remove the sovereign debt from their shelves. Signor Draghi has promised to do his best, but one of his assistants, Herr Weidmann, a German, believes that the toxic bank debt is harmless, and that anyway nobody will notice. He is refusing to operate the decontamination equipment.
Your actually trying out buying a home analyst,
Copyright 2013 John Mauldin. All Rights Reserved.
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TRUMP WILL DO LITTLE FOR U.S. WORKERS / BARRON´S MAGAZINE
| Etiquetas: Donald Trump, Economics, The Elites, U.S. Economic And Political
Wall Street's Best Minds
Bill Gross: Trump Will Do Little for U.S. Workers
The Janus fund manager argues Donald Trump’s policies aren’t much help for working-class supporters.
By William H. Gross
The Trumpian Fox has entered the Populist Henhouse, not so much by stealth but as a result of Middle America’s misinterpretation of what will make America great again. Not having voted for either establishment party’s candidate, I write in amazed, almost amused bewilderment at what American voters have done to themselves. A Reuters/Ipsos Election Day Survey of 10,000 voters revealed the extraordinary fury of the American populist movement. Almost 72% agreed that “the American economy is rigged to the advantage of the rich and powerful.”
Count me among them, yet in voting to deny Hillary Clinton the Henhouse, they “unwittingly” (lack of wit), let Donald Trump sneak in the side door. His tenure will be a short four years but is likely to be a damaging one for jobless and low-wage American voters. They were the force for Trump’s flipping the Midwest into a Republican Electoral College victory. But while the Fox promised jobs and to make America great again, his policies of greater defense and infrastructure spending combined with lower corporate taxes to invigorate the private sector continue to favor capital versus labor, markets versus wages, and is a continuation of the status quo.
For example, Republican pleas for tax reform are centered around the argument that America has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world at 35%. Not so. Of the S&P 500’s largest 50 corporations, the average tax rate (including state, local and foreign regulations) is 24%. U.S. corporations rank among the world’s most lightly, as opposed to heavily, taxed. Trump policies also appear to favor the repatriation of trillions of dollars of foreign profits at extremely low cost under the logic that the money will be spent for investment here in the U.S. Doubtful. The last time such a “pardon” was put into law in 2004, no noticeable pickup in investment took place. Of the $362 billion that earned a “tax holiday”, most went to dividends, corporate bonuses, and stock buybacks. Apple or any other large U.S. corporation can borrow the money they need here in the U.S. at historically low interest rates to fund investment. A few have, but over $500 billion annually in recent years has gone to the repurchase of corporate stock and the increase of earnings per share, instead of earnings and GDP growth. Why would they need to repatriate anything for investment in the real economy?
But could a Clinton Administration have done much better? Probably not. Both the Clinton Democrats and almost all Republicans represent the corporate status quo that favors markets versus wages; Wall Street versus Main Street. That’s why the American public and indeed global citizens will continually take a wrong turn in their efforts to neuter the establishment and to regain several decades’ lost momentum in real wages versus real profits. Neither party as they now stand has bold policies beyond the reach of K Street Lobbyists. To my mind, there are better solutions than either party’s election platform, such as a Keynesian/FDR job corps or a Kennedyesque AmeriCorps that puts people to work helping other people.
Such programs were never emphasized by either candidate. Let’s supplement welfare with a patriotic “Help America” jobs program, even if government organized. Would it be as efficient as a corporate-led effort? Of course not, but corporations are fighting structural headwinds, such as demographic aging, technological displacement of jobs (robotization), deglobalization, and overleveraged balance sheets. They focus on the bottom line as opposed to the public welfare. Government must step in, not by reducing taxes, which will only increase profits at the expense of labor, but by being the employer of last resort in hopefully a productive way.
Populism is on the march and a Trump victory will do little to halt its advance in future decades. If anything, it is demographically baked in the cake. Investors, as The Economist astutely pointed out, face a possible no-win situation. Unless the worker’s share of GDP reverses its downward trend, and capital’s share peaks, then populists worldwide will reject establishment parties in almost every future election – initiating in some cases growth-negative policies revolving around trade, immigration, and yes, in Trump’s case, lower taxation that may lower GDP growth, not raise it. Global populism is the wave of the future, but it has taken a wrong turn in America. Investors must drive with caution, understanding that higher deficits resulting from lower taxes raise interest rates and inflation, which in turn have the potential to produce lower earnings and P/E ratios. There is no new Trump bull market in the offing. Be satisfied with 3-5% globally diversified returns. The Wall Street, finance-led hegemon is fading.
The Populist sunrise has barely broken the horizon.
THE CITY AND THE NATION / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES
| Etiquetas: Nationalism, The Elites, U.S. Economic And Political, United Kingdom
The City and the Nation
Recent votes in the U.S. and U.K. reveal nationalism is evolving into different forms.
We take for granted today how remarkable the modern nation is. Countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Russia contain multitudes of different types of individuals, the vast majority of whom are relatively unaffected by foreign policy. Hans Morgenthau pointed out that nationalism drives these disparate individuals to experience the power and policies of their nations as their own, and that aggressive nationalism is often a result of economic or political stress. This is the great paradox of nationalism. It supplanted tribalism, faith and monarchy as the organizing principle of the international order in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it is the glue that binds diverse groups of individuals together into states. But it also means defining who isn’t a part of the nation, which can unbind both society and broader international institutions.
Today, nationalism in certain urban areas comes from a different source than in suburban and rural areas. The urban-rural split is not a novel discovery, but it has become more pronounced as a result of resurging nationalism. For example, when people in the U.K. voted on whether to remain in the European Union, Wales and England voted to leave. Scotland, Northern Ireland and the City of London voted to remain. The result of the referendum in London is the most striking. Scotland and Northern Ireland have been independent at various points in history, but London has been the capital of what is today England for almost a millennium. Of all Londoners, 60 percent voted to remain in the EU, but the majority of English voters wanted to leave. Some suggested (maybe jokingly) that, just as Scotland and Northern Ireland have done, London should explore whether it can remain within the EU and leave the rest of England behind.
The results in the recent U.S. presidential election are even more striking. Donald Trump is often described as a nationalist candidate and in many respects the label fits. His slogan, “Make America Great Again,” to him meant getting rid of those who aren’t American (illegal immigrants) and instituting policies (repealing NAFTA, raising tariffs) that will be best for the American worker and not for the global economy. Americans’ response to Trump’s campaign revealed a distinct urban-rural divide, with New York City being a particularly salient example. Hillary Clinton won the five boroughs of New York City by an 81-19 percent margin. Take the votes of the five boroughs away, and Clinton wouldn’t have even carried New York state. It was not a coincidence that New York City became the epicenter of anti-Trump protests. It was precisely because New Yorkers could not believe they lived in a country where Trump could win a presidential election.
A supporter of Donald Trump holds up a "Make America Great Again" sign as he addresses supporters during a campaign stop at the International Exposition Center on Oct. 22, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. Justin Merriman/Getty Images
London and New York City are interesting case studies in how much cities can differ from the rest of the country. In London, for example, the median average salary for a resident in 2015 was nearly double that of the rest of the U.K. – 48,023 pounds ($59,800) compared to 27,531 pounds. This is in part because of a higher cost of living of course, but consider all the other ways in which London differs from neighboring counties. According to a report by consulting firm McKinsey, London’s GDP grew 27 percent faster than that of the U.K. as a whole. According to the U.K.’s last census in 2011, 37 percent of all London residents were not born in the United Kingdom. For the rest of the U.K., that figure was only 9 percent. London’s population is seven times bigger than any other British city and accounts for almost 15 percent of Britain’s total population.
In New York City and the U.S., the divide is just as conspicuous. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income in the U.S. in 2014 was $51,939. In Manhattan, a borough of New York City, it was $69,569 and in nearby Westchester county, where the Clintons have a home and which is much more a part of New York City than it is part of the rest of the state, it was $81,946. New York City’s population is also disproportionately large, double the size of any other major U.S. city, and makes up roughly 40 percent of New York state.
Compared to rural areas of the U.S., New York City is also markedly more diverse. According to New York City’s Department of City Planning, in 2011, 37 percent of all New Yorkers were foreign born. This is in stark contrast to a state like Iowa, which Barack Obama won in 2006 and 2012 but flipped to Trump in 2016. A study published in 2014 by Iowa State University used data from three different time periods from over 99 Iowan towns to put together a composite image of the typical Iowan small town. The population of this fictional town in 2013 was 1,977 people, 92 percent of whom were white.
The needs of city dwellers have always differed from those who live in rural areas, just as the interests of people on the coast differ from those of people in the interior. But along with nationalism and the urban-rural divide, there is a rise in connectivity between megacities, where residents increasingly have more in common with each other than with other citizens within their countries. And because of advances in communication and technology, these city dwellers can freely communicate with and travel to visit their urban comrades in other countries more easily than at any other moment in human history. They view the values of their fellow citizens – based in nationalism tied to the state partly because they are more isolated and more dependent on the state than the city dweller – as provincial. At times, they prefer the values they share with people who live in cities – even if they are citizens of a different country.
As Londoners joke that they want to remain in the EU even after Brexit and New Yorkers continue their protests outside Trump Tower with chants of “not my president,” they are expressing a kind of solidarity with each other. This is not to say that London and New York City are about to secede from their respective countries and become independent city-states; the situation is not nearly so dire. But cities are now developing their own form of nationalism around shared urban values, while nationalism based on the nation-state lives on in non-urban areas. The average New Yorker doesn’t see how important and seductive Trump’s promise of restoring America’s greatness is to someone living in the Rust Belt or the rural South, where jobs are leaving, times are hard and on top of it all America seems weaker than ever. The average Londoner doesn’t see how important the U.K.’s sovereignty is to the average British citizen, who might not care about passport-free travel because he can’t afford a holiday in Italy anyways.
As a result, those who live in cities begin to feel as disconnected from the body politic as the body politic does from the political and financial elites. And in cities, which are diverse and often home to many immigrants, nationalism is expressed not in full-throated pledges of allegiance to the state, but rather by a reversion to the other national identities they carry within them. They feel less American, but more Jewish, Mexican, black, Dominican or whatever other identities are an important part of their individual lives. They feel less British, but more Scottish, Irish, Ulster or even European, whatever that means to them. Still others see themselves as part of a more global community, united more at times by a particular set of cherished values than by loyalty to their country, and take comfort in knowing that their worldviews are shared by those in other cities. All of these reactions are also forms of nationalism, though many in the cities don’t realize it, as they think of nationalism as that visceral and at times even illiberal reaction that “others” have. But there’s no way to escape nationalism in uncertain times such as these, and as nationalist sentiments increase, they will continue to bring people together and split them apart.
THIS UPCOMING "BLACK SWAN" EVENT COULD WIPE OUT YOUR LIFE SAVINGS / CASEY DAILY DISPATCH
| Etiquetas: Europe Economic and Political, Italy
This Upcoming "Black Swan" Event Could Wipe Out Your Life Savings
Justin Spittler
First “Brexit,” then Trump.
In just the last six months, the world has had two “black swan” events. These are rare events that very few people see coming. When these kinds of events happen, the market reaction can be dramatic.
Consider Brexit…
Heading into the year, most people thought Great Britain would stay in the European Union (EU).
When it voted to leave on June 23, investors from London to Tokyo were shocked. A panic followed that knocked more than $3 trillion from the global stock market in two days.
Last week, investors were caught off guard again.
Most people thought Hillary would run away with the election. When Trump pulled off the “unthinkable,” no one knew what to do.
At first, U.S. stocks plunged. That was supposed to happen if Trump won. But they quickly changed course. Over the last few days, U.S. stocks have broken out to record highs.
• To be fair, neither of these events was impossible to predict…
Casey Research founder Doug Casey actually predicted that Trump would win months ago. He even made a couple side bets on the outcome.
We don’t bring this up to brag about Doug’s “guru sense.”
We’re telling you this because it shows that you can predict events most people can't ever anticipate.
And if you’re right, you can make a lot of money.
• Less than three weeks from now, we think another "black swan" event will take place…
If this event goes the way we expect, millions of people could see their life savings go up in smoke.
The world’s biggest economy could start to unravel.
You might find this hard to believe. But as you’re about to see, we aren’t the only ones worried about this.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a victim. Today, we’ll show you how to turn this coming crisis into big returns.
But before we get to that, you need to understand something…
• Brexit and Trump’s surprise victory had more in common than most people think…
You see, working-class people in England and the United States are fed up right now. They feel like the system is “rigged”…that “the establishment” doesn’t care about them.
That’s why both countries voted for radical change. Even President Obama admits this. Bloomberg Politics reported on Tuesday:
President Barack Obama said that fear of globalization and suspicion of government institutions and elites powered both the U.K.’s vote to exit the European Union and Donald Trump’s election as the next U.S. president.
“Did I recognize there was anger and frustration in the American population? Of course I did,” Obama said in answer to a question about whether he saw parallels between Trump’s election and Brexit.
• To their credit, the American people have plenty of reasons to be frustrated…
After all, the economy has grown at an annualized rate of just 2.1% since 2009. This makes the current “recovery” the slowest since World War II.
What’s worse, the real median household income has fallen from $57,795 in 2007 to $55,218 today.
In other words, millions of Americans are now worse off than they were before the last financial crisis.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has more than tripled in value over the same period.
This disconnect between the stock market and the “real” economy is why so many people think “the system” isn’t working. And it’s why a lot of people voted for Trump.
Trump’s an outsider. He’s never held public office. He says whatever the hell he wants. And he’s promised to shake things up.
• But Americans aren’t the only people hungry for radical change…
Italians are just as fed up with their government.
Nick Giambruno, editor of Crisis Investing, says they have every reason to feel this way. Nick wrote in the August issue:
Italy has had no productive growth since 1999. Real GDP per person is smaller than it was at the turn of the century.
That’s almost two decades of economic stagnation. By any measure, the Italian economy is in a deep depression. And there’s no end in sight. In fact, things will probably get much worse.
• Italians are now in a revolutionary mood…
This mood has given rise to a populist, anti-establishment political group known as the Five Star Movement (M5S).
According to Nick, M5S wants Italy to hit the reset button. He wrote last month:
M5S blames Italy’s chronic lack of growth on the euro currency. A large plurality of Italians agrees.
M5S has promised to hold a vote to leave the euro and reinstate Italy’s old currency, the lira, as soon as it’s in power. And that could be very soon.
Of course, M5S will have to assume power before Italy can drop the euro. But that could happen as soon as next month.
• Italy will hold a constitutional referendum vote on December 4…
Nick explained what this upcoming vote could mean for Italy’s future:
In effect, a “Yes” vote is a vote of approval for Renzi’s government.
A “No” vote is a chance for the average Italian to give the finger to EU bureaucrats in Brussels.
Given the intense anger Italians feel right now, it’s very likely they’ll do just that.
According to the latest polls, most Italians plan to vote “No.” If this happens, Renzi, Italy’s current prime minister, has promised to step down. That would make it much easier for M5S to rise to power.
• Even if Renzi breaks his promise, Italy could still have serious problems…
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday:
A defeat for Mr. Renzi would lead to a period of political instability. Mr. Renzi could follow through on a pledge to resign or be forced into a new coalition until elections are held in 2018.
Either way, markets would interpret his defeat as proof that Rome is incapable of reform, raising doubts about Italy’s ability ever to deliver the kind of growth needed to put its debt burden of 135% of gross domestic product on a sustainable footing.
The Journal went on:
That in turn would make investors even more reluctant to put capital into the Italian banking system, forcing banks to impose losses on bondholders, many of whom are ordinary savers.
That would create a spectacular political backlash that could bring the deeply euroskeptic, antiestablishment 5 Star Movement to power in 2018, putting Italy’s euro membership in doubt.
• You might not think this is anything to worry about if you live outside of Europe…
But the Italian referendum (or "Quitaly," as some are calling it) could do far more damage than Brexit.
You see, unlike the U.K., Italy actually uses the euro. If it leaves the EU, Europeans could lose “faith” in the euro…and that’s all a paper currency like the euro has.
Also, you have to remember that Brexit caused stocks around the world to crash. If Italy leaves the euro, the same thing could happen…but the downturn could be much more violent. Nick wrote in August:
The bottom line is this: the entire EU project may very well die in Italy later this year. That would undoubtedly trigger a stock market crash of historical proportions. And that’s why I think it’s very important to keep a close eye on the Achilles’ heel of the EU… Italy.
The Financial Times recently issued a similar warning:
An Italian exit from the single currency would trigger the total collapse of the eurozone within a very short period.
It would probably lead to the most violent economic shock in history, dwarfing the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008 and the 1929 Wall Street crash.
Even if the Financial Times is only half right, we could be looking at a stock market crash of historic proportions.
• But Nick didn’t just warn his readers about this looming crisis… He told them how to profit from it...
In August, Nick recommended that his readers short the euro. Shorting is when you bet that a stock, bond, or currency will fall. If it does, you make money.
A lot of people think shorting is something only the "pros” do. But Nick found a way to short the euro that’s as easy as buying a share of McDonald’s (MCD).
In just three months, Nick’s readers are up 12% on this trade. But they could see much bigger gains if Nick’s right about the upcoming Italian referendum vote.
And remember, this vote will take place less than three weeks from now.
Italy’s bond market is screaming "danger."
Today’s chart shows the yield for the Italian 10-year government bond since July 2015. Remember, a bond's yield rises as its price falls.
As you can see, the yield for the Italian 10-year government bond hit an all-time low of 1.04% in early August. Since then, it’s surged to 2.12%. Put another way, it's more than doubled in only three months.
This is a serious red flag. It tells us investors are very nervous about Italy. And they have every reason to be. If Italy’s upcoming referendum goes the way we expect, Italy’s bond market could implode. And that could mark the beginning of the end for the euro.
Nick’s so convinced this will happen that he sent an alert to his readers on Tuesday telling them to short Italian bonds. In other words, he doubled down on his bet against Italy.
DEMONETIZATION IN INDIA: WHO WILL PAY THE PRICE? / KNOWLEDGE@WHARTON
| Etiquetas: Demonetization, Economics, India
Demonetization in India: Who Will Pay the Price?
The ‘demon’ in demonetization is in the beginning. On November 8, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in a broadcast to the nation that Rs500 ($7.40) and Rs1,000 currency notes would no longer be recognized legally as currency. “Great,” said Corporate India, economic commentators, foreign investors, international think tanks and global rating agencies. “Masterstroke,” echoed the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
The aim behind the government’s action was to combat tax cheating, counterfeiting and corruption. Eliminating large denominations makes it harder to hide large amounts of cash.
Modi noted that the move complements the country’s swachh bharat abhiyan (Clean India campaign). “For years, this country has felt that corruption, black money and terrorism are festering sores, holding us back in the race towards development,” he said. “To break the grip of corruption and black money, we have decided that the currency notes presently in use will no longer be legal tender from midnight tonight.”
Added Finance Minister Arun Jaitley: “The goal of this is to clean transactions, [to] clean money.”
“This announcement appears to be the most significant change made by the Modi government to date,” says Girish Vanvari, partner and head (tax), KPMG in India. “Its impact could be even bigger than GST (the Goods and Services Tax which is still running the gauntlet of politicians).” Adds a report by Crisil, a global S&P company: “Tuesday’s move could change the face of the Indian economy, improve the government’s fiscal position and tax compliance.
The size of the cash economy will shrink, as will black money generation avenues, because of the better cash-flow trail.”
That was Tuesday. By Wednesday, the picture on the streets had begun changing somewhat:
The demon started surfacing. India is a cash economy; almost everyone keeps a few Rs500 notes as a nest egg. Lines began forming in front of ATMs and banks which could exchange old notes for new. A mere exchange — a new Rs500 for an old Rs500 — was not enough; there was also a limit imposed on how much one could exchange or withdraw from their accounts. In some cases, there were altercations as people waited for hours. Gas pumps and hospitals (which were allowed to accept old notes) saw a boom in business. People also wanted smaller currency notes to serve their daily needs.
A loaf of bread costs Rs25. No shopkeeper would give change for Rs500.
The need for the government to keep the move a secret — so that tax evaders wouldn’t be alerted before the demonetization took place — affected preparedness. Jaitley admits it will take two-three weeks to reconfigure the ATMs to handle the newer and larger notes. A Rs2,000 note has also been introduced. Modi has suggested it will take 50 days (until the end of 2016) for people to adjust to the change.
Meanwhile, expensive marriages were called off. Deaths cannot be called off so easily — but the government catered to that by allowing payment at crematoria in old currency.
A Bold Move
“This [demonetization] is a step which will make a positive difference, if the transition challenges get handled well by the administration,” says Jitendra V. Singh, Wharton emeritus professor of management. “We will need to be careful of potential attempts to derail this positive agenda.” The International Monetary Fund (IMF) echoes those sentiments. “We support the measures to fight corruption and illicit financial flows in India,” said a spokesperson. “Of course, given the large role of cash in everyday transactions in India’s economy, the currency transition will have to be managed prudently to minimize possible disruption.”
According to Mauro F. Guillen, a Wharton management professor and director of the School’s Lauder Institute, “In the short term, [the move] could stifle some businesses that are legal and clean, if they use cash payments. But everyone will adjust. And while it can hurt some small businesses and individuals, it is better to do it than not.”
Guillen adds that large-value currency is an “important source of problems” such as corruption, black money, terrorism and counterfeit money. “The eurozone will be eliminating the largest euro note. The U.S. is also trying to reduce the [number of] 100 dollar bills in circulation.”
The role of cash and high-value bank notes in the Indian economy cannot be understated.
According to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) figures, as of March 2016 currency in circulation amounted to Rs16,415 billion. Of this, Rs500 notes accounted for 47.8% in value and Rs1,000 notes another 38.6%. Together, they were more than 86% of the value of the notes in circulation. That’s a whopping amount to be frozen in one fell swoop.
Understandably, banks and ATMs can do only so much. There’s a lot of tinkering to be done with limits and schedules of the exchange outlets and bodies authorized to take payments in old bills — state-owned electricity suppliers, for instance. To the credit of the government, this is being done on a continuous basis. But there are questions — especially from political parties — over their effectiveness.
Will It Work?
There are also questions over whether the “masterstroke” is masterful enough. “Black money is not synonymous with corruption; it is rather one of several symptoms of corruption,” notes Rajesh Chakrabarti, professor and executive vice dean of the Jindal Global Business School at Jindal Global University. Pointing out that only a small percentage (by some estimates as low as less than 6%) of the unaccounted wealth is held in cash, Chakrabarti says: “This intervention is a one-time draining of this current stock of black money but unless the root causes of corruption are removed, corruption will continue. It is sort of like a dialysis, more of a short term cleaning up than a solution of the problem. It needs to be repeated periodically.”
The Indian reality, adds Chakrabarti, is that many trades and areas are still cash-based and “cannot be digitized just by willing it.” He cautions that the “resulting disruption in the real economy stemming from this move is very significant and potentially fatal” for some vulnerable sections of society. “If some of the key areas are hampered, there is risk of mob violence and rioting. Since the entire country is at risk, there is no way of anticipating and preparing for this, either. So there is a risk of the situation getting out of hand as well.”
“There are serious negative externalities that have been created over time,” says Wharton’s Singh.
“The black money parallel economy, for which no reliable size estimates are easily available, has become an increasingly serious problem over the years. This poses not only all manner of macroeconomic management challenges, it creates distortions in the economy.”
Singh offers a hypothetical example. “Imagine that I own some land in Bangalore. I want to sell the land, and I have no interest in short-circuiting the law. I want to pay all my taxes in India and elsewhere. However, I am told that the common practice is that some significant percentage of such a transaction will involve black money, maybe as much as 40%. If I want an all-white transaction, the selling price will be much lower. Imagine my dismay at learning this.
The point is that the retrograde practices that have emerged with the black economy force innocent, honest people into considering illegal actions, because that has become the norm over time.”
There are many benefits that will come with the government’s move, Singh notes. “The size of the formal economy which the government can manage though its policy actions will increase, perhaps significantly. This step may have positive implications for tax revenues longer term.
There may even be influences on the growth rate of GDP. However, for sectors like real estate, a notorious hotbed for black money transactions, there will likely be disinflationary pressures short term, with prices being pushed downward before they stabilize longer term.” Real estate shares have plunged, in some cases by more than 30%.
But the stock market may be the wrong place to look for signs of how the demonetization move has been received, because it coincided with Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. (“America counts votes as India counts notes,” headlined The Times of India.) That was a global dampener. The Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index (Sensex) fell 1,000 points on Wednesday morning before ending up just 250 points down. The next day saw a 500 point rally followed by a 700-point plunge. The first two trading days of the next week saw another 1,000-point (nearly 4%) fall.
While most people are short-term pessimists but pin their faith on the long term, there are those who are skeptical of that aspect, too. “The cancellation of high-denomination notes is not expected to curtail black money or the black economy in the long run,” says Dev Kar, chief economist at Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based think tank advocacy group. Kar is the author of a report titled “The Drivers and Dynamics of Illicit Financial Flows from India:
1948-2008.” The report estimates India lost a total of $213 billion due to illicit flows in that period. “The total value of illicit assets held abroad represents about 72% of the size of India’s underground economy which has been estimated at 50% of India’s GDP (or about $640 billion at end 2008),” says the report.
“Demonetization will place a temporary brake on illegal transactions in cash until operators figure out alternative ways of financing such transactions,” continues Kar. “The U.S. dollar and pound sterling obtained from the local black markets is one such way. This shift will drive up the dollar in the black market and increase the spread with the official rate, which will in turn put pressure on the official rate to depreciate.
Finally, the fact that the government has already announced Rs2,000 notes is a tacit admission that people need higher denomination notes in the future due to inflation. Expected inflation is running high due to India’s monetary and fiscal history. Small notes will rapidly lose further value so that essential goods cannot be purchased with a reasonable quantity. Governance needs to be improved in all its dimensions. Cosmetics will not cut it.”
Singh has some reservations, too. “It will not be enough just to do this [demonetization],” he says. “It has to be matched with a better, more streamlined and integrated tax system. The upcoming move to GST is a measure in the right direction, and the government needs to move forward with implementing the next steps of that reform measure.”
But, nonetheless, he sees the move as positive. “It is remarkable that PM Modi has taken this bold step. Clearly, there will be howls of protest from some. A simple analysis can be done by asking ‘cui bono’, which is Latin for ‘who benefits’ from the status quo. Just who has the stacks of Rs500 and Rs1,000 bills and cannot account for them? Those parties will not be happy with this step. But for the ordinary Indian, while there may be some discomfort during the transition, this will be fine in the longer term.”
Meanwhile, a group of prominent citizens including social activist Aruna Roy, economist Jayati Ghosh and writer Nayantara Sahgal have called the decision to demonetize Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes as “misconceived” and have demanded for it to be rolled back or suspended if the inconvenience to the public is not resolved immediately. In a joint statement questioning various aspects of the demonetization move, they have said: “Black money is generated through evasion of taxes on income from lawful activities and money generated from illegal activities. In the absence of steps to curb the generation of black money, demonetization is a futile exercise, as it proved to be in 1978.”
The Supreme Court of India, while refusing to stay the demonetization move, has asked the Modi government to file an affidavit detailing the steps being taken to ease the inconvenience to the general public.
For Modi, this is work in progress. In his speech to the nation, he outlined what his government has done so far. A law was passed in 2015 for disclosure of foreign black money. Agreements with many countries, including the U.S., have been made to add provisions for sharing banking information. A strict law has come into force from August 2016 to curb benami transactions, or the purchase of property and deals using fictitious names — a way of deploying black money earned through corruption. A scheme was introduced for declaring black money after paying a stiff penalty. And arching over it all was the Prime Minister’s Jan Dhan Yojana, which aimed at financial inclusion for the whole country. Launched in August 2014, it has managed to add 250 million bank accounts through November 2016. Demonetization, then, was inevitable; the only surprise being when.
TRUMP WILL DO LITTLE FOR U.S. WORKERS / BARRON´S M...
THIS UPCOMING "BLACK SWAN" EVENT COULD WIPE OUT YO...
DEMONETIZATION IN INDIA: WHO WILL PAY THE PRICE? /...
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ADJUSTING THE CAPE MEASURE: EQUITY VALUATIONS ARE HIGH. BUT OTHER OPTIONS LOOK EVEN WORSE / THE ECONOMIST
| Etiquetas: CAPE, Investment Strategies, Stock Markets
Adjusting the CAPE measure
Equity valuations are high. But other options look even worse
A favoured market ratio is not much use as a short-term indicator
EVERY investor would like to find the perfect measurement tool to tell them when to get into, and out of, the stockmarket. The cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (CAPE), as calculated by Robert Shiller of Yale University, averages profits over ten years and is used by many as an important valuation indicator. Currently it shows that American shares have hitherto been more highly valued only in 1929 and the late 1990s, periods that were followed by big crashes.
That seems ominous. But as a paper by Dylan Grice and Gregor Obrecht of Calibrium, a Zurich-based private-investment office, makes clear, it is far from conclusive. The CAPE is not much use as a short-term indicator; it has been well above its long-term average for several years now, as it was in the late 1990s.
The main argument for the CAPE is a long-term one. If you divide all past CAPE values into quintiles, the annual returns earned over the subsequent decade by investing in equities when the CAPE was in its most-expensive quintile were more than eight percentage points below the returns earned when the CAPE was in its cheapest quintile (see chart).
However, the case is less cut-and-dried than those numbers seem. First, Messrs Grice and Obrecht point out that this approach is subject to hindsight bias. The long-term valuation range may be clear now; past investors did not know the range when they were actually buying shares. If the data are adjusted to reflect the historical data available to investors at the time, then the outperformance gap falls by more than a percentage point.
A more serious problem relates to the quantity of the data. Mr Shiller has 146 years of numbers for earnings; that breaks down into only 14 completely independent ten-year periods. It is pretty difficult to create a robust statistical case from such a paucity of numbers.
The authors calculate that, based on current valuations, the best forecast for ten-year real annual returns from American equities is 2.6%, well below the historical average. But the range of returns can only be estimated with reasonable confidence to be between -3.4% and +8.7%; something that is likely to seem too broad to be of much use to professional investors.
These criticisms are fair. So why, nevertheless, does it still seem likely that a high CAPE portends lower future returns? Future equity returns can come from only two sources—growth in profits, or the market’s placing a higher valuation on those profits. For example, a high CAPE might be justified when profits are unusually low, by the hope that earnings will recover.
However, profits are high, relative to GDP, at the moment. Perhaps this is the result of a shift in power in favour of capital, at the expense of labour; perhaps it is the result of the greater concentration of some industries, which has given certain businesses monopoly-like margins. It is possible that this shift is permanent, and that profits will not fall back as they have in previous cycles. But it seems the height of optimism to believe that profits will grow faster than GDP, ie, that the overall share of capital will rise even further.
GDP growth is itself largely driven either by an increasing number of workers or by a rise in their productivity. Since the size of the workforce is rising more slowly (and is set to fall in some countries), and recent productivity growth has been disappointing, it is hard to be more optimistic on this score. So rapid growth in either GDP or profits looks difficult to achieve.
Turning to valuation, some believe that the CAPE has trended higher in recent decades because of better accounting standards and corporate governance. Earning high returns in an era of sluggish profits growth would require valuations to rise even further, reaching dotcom-era levels. Even a partial reversion to the mean (the long-term CAPE average is 16.8 compared with about 30 today) would be very bad news. Here, too, there is a natural limit on returns.
However, the authors point out that investors are not looking at equities in isolation; they are choosing between asset classes including cash (yielding virtually nothing) and government bonds. Government-bond yields are very low in historical terms; in other words, valuations are very high. A comparison of the expected returns from equities and bonds shows equities should perform much better, even given the high level of the CAPE.
That insight chimes with the views of many fund managers. They are nervous about equity valuations but they find government bonds deeply unattractive. So they are stuck with the stockmarket as the “least dirty shirt” on offer.
WHY LEADERS ARE MADE, NOT BORN / KNOWLEDGE@WHARTON
| Etiquetas: Leadership
Why Leaders Are Made, Not Born
Inspired by her own struggles, Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn turned to figures from the past who overcame adversity to leave a lasting mark on civilization. She learned that true leaders are those who can forge through impossible odds with intelligence, compassion and resilience. Koehn has captured the stories of five inspiring historical figures in her book, Forged In Crisis: The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times. They include Abraham Lincoln, who presided over the United States at a pivotal time in its young history; Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist who escaped slavery to become a writer and a statesman; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German clergyman who became a double agent against the Nazis; Ernest Shackleton, a polar explorer who survived a shipwreck on an ice floe; and Rachel Carson, a scientist whose work sparked the modern environmental movement. Koehn recently joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111 to discuss her book and why true leaders are made, not born.
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: Where did the idea for this book come from?
Nancy Koehn: Ironically, the germs of the book came from finding myself in a series of completely unexpected crises, both personal and professional. My father died. Three months later, my husband walked out after 15 years of marriage. I got cancer with no risk factors. A couple of years passed, I got cancer again, befuddling all the doctors. I was beset by high waves and huge, big, strong winds.
I realized I’m a historian by training, so I grabbed for books of Abraham Lincoln’s writings. I started at the back of his life, the end of the Civil War, and I reread backwards. With each of his letters and speeches and columns he wrote for newspapers, I kept thinking to myself, “Nancy, you think you have crises; Lincoln had much more to deal with, both in terms of being president and dealing with all kinds of personal losses he and his wife had suffered.”
That was the genesis. How do we navigate through crisis? How do leaders? Because this was so clear in Lincoln’s case. How do leaders not only navigate and lead their followers through crisis, but how do they become better, stronger, more embracing of a worthy purpose with more access to their muscles of moral courage? I thought that was such a compelling question.
That was really the beginnings of the book. Then I found these other four fascinating people with their jaw-dropping, gripping stories, and I was off to the races.
Knowledge@Wharton: Lincoln’s story is well-known to most Americans, as is perhaps the story of Frederick Douglass. But the other people you selected — Ernest Shackleton, Rachel Carson and Dietrich Bonhoeffer — are not exactly household names.
Koehn: That was part of the reason to include these stories I stumbled on. I didn’t know much about Douglass, even though I’m a historian. I was trained as a European historian. I think a lot of Americans don’t know the astounding challenges he overcame as a slave who escaped to the North to get his freedom, and then as a tireless activist to abolish slavery.
Ernest Shackleton was this explorer whose boat goes through the ice off the coast of Antarctica in 1915. He’s stranded with lifeboats, some canned goods and no means of communication, and somehow he’s got to get his 27-man team home alive.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor who was active in the resistance to Hitler throughout the 1930s. In the 1940s, he becomes a double agent within with the Nazi government to try and kill Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich.
Rachel Carson is this very quiet, retiring scientist and writer who literally rocks the world and almost single-handedly launches the environmental movement when she publishes Silent Spring in 1962.
I just thought these stories are amazing. They’re like the best movies we’ve ever seen. I’ve got to tell them.
Knowledge@Wharton: Bonhoeffer’s story as a double agent and a pastor is something that a Hollywood movie scriptwriter would love.
Koehn: I could not agree more. You can’t make this stuff up. Here’s a man who’s a pacifist, who’s a deeply committed Christian, who has spent years of his young adult life lecturing on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as the noose of Nazi evil tightens. He has family members who are working inside the government as resistors, so he knows the inside story of what the Nazi government is doing, including the beginnings of what we call today the Holocaust. He is more and more frustrated by his inability to do something, through alternative churches that he and others have helped found, to resist the Nazi government.
Eventually, he has to come to terms with this terrible moral dilemma, which is, “We may have to kill Hitler in order to stop a much greater evil. Yet we cannot escape the moral consequences of what we’re doing.” He grapples with that and ultimately decides to cross that line and do that. The story is fascinating inside and out in terms of what he experienced.
Knowledge@Wharton: Wasn’t one of his problems also the fact that Adolf Hitler and Nazis really didn’t respect the church that much to begin with?
Koehn: Not at all. They had no patience for the true teachings of Christianity, either in the Old Testament or in the New Testament, and for Judaism. They had absolutely no respect for the nobler messages of a lot of great religions. They were doing everything they could to manage and control churches toward messages that supported their power, that supported Nazi teachings. Again, here’s someone who, everywhere he turns, is stymied by an authoritarian regime bent on war and bent on making war on its own citizens, anyone they considered enemies of the state. Some of the really interesting and gripping parts of the chapter are the Gestapo trying to trap Bonhoeffer.
Knowledge@Wharton: Unfortunately, Bonhoeffer was assassinated. At that time, that was the only option that Nazis considered. If you were thought to be against their establishment, they were willing to get rid of you and not even think twice.
Koehn: Right. And Bonhoeffer was from a very well-connected family in Berlin, a storied family with a great deal of power. They were not supporters of the Nazi regime, but they were historically very important people. It speaks to their determination to literally eliminate suspected enemies that they murdered Bonhoeffer. He is killed by the German state in April 1945. Two weeks later, the place where he is murdered is liberated by Allied Forces advancing into Germany. But for a couple of weeks, this brave, serious, very courageous man would have lived.
Knowledge@Wharton: Did I read correctly that he spent some time in the United States?
Koehn: He spent a critical year in New York, teaching and lecturing and learning at the Union Theological Seminary. He was back there again in 1939. His friends in Germany had spirited him off for a year away before he was either called up for conscription, because the Nazis were making war in 1939, or he was arrested by the Gestapo. He goes to New York and realizes, “I cannot be here in good conscience. I have to go back and join my brethren in the struggle to overthrow Nazi Germany.” He gets on one of the last ships to sail for Germany from America before war breaks out, a month before World War II begins.
Knowledge@Wharton: You said there are elements of Douglass’s life that a lot of people don’t really know or understand. Take us deeper.
Kohn: Let me give you one example that still stays with me. I use it in my own life to steel my own muscles of courage. Douglass was a strong, very intelligent, very resourceful teenager who couldn’t stand being a slave. His owner sends him off to a man named Edward Covey, who is known as a slave-breaker. These were people whose job it was to intimidate slaves into more docility and more subservience through both through physical violence and emotional abuse.
Owners often sent recalcitrant black men to these people.
Douglass is with the slave-breaker and he’s scared. Covey’s been beating him. He had run away to his owner to seek some kind of redress. His owner had sent him back to Covey. He’s worried that Covey’s going to attack him, and Covey comes at him one hot summer Monday morning. Douglass decides in that moment to step into the fear and confront Covey. They have this huge physical fight. It goes on for two hours. They’re wrestling. They don’t have weapons. Covey calls other slaves to come help him, and the black man and woman he calls refuse to get involved. They watch. And for two hours, these men wrestle. In the end, it’s a draw. Neither brings the other to the ground decisively. But a draw for Frederick Douglass is a victory. Covey relents and never, ever touches Frederick Douglass again.
In his first autobiography, Narrative of a Slave, Douglass says, “You have seen how a man is made a slave. Now you see how a slave was made a man.” He recovers his self-confidence. He recovers his sense of identity. He rips through, cuts through the years of varnish of depression and loss of agency that slavery, and particularly this man, has imposed on him, and he is made, he has access to his stronger self. That is such a powerful lesson for all of us, when we face some of our worst fears and take the first small step into that fear to discover our truer, braver, stronger self. It’s an amazing story, and there are many more like it in his life’s journey.
Knowledge@Wharton: He is considered to be one of the most important African-Americans of the 19th century.
Koehn: Oh, I think he was. I think he’s one of the most important leaders in American history.
The book makes the point that these two leaders of the five, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, ended up working for a common purpose to end slavery. They came to know each other, and they came to respect each other.
I make this point, which is not always made when we talk about Lincoln as the great emancipator, that Lincoln could never have done what he did — issue the Emancipation Proclamation, then prosecute the rest of the war as a war to end slavery and save the union — without all the work on the ground that Frederick Douglass did as a spokesperson, an activist, a man who was changing political momentum of northern whites towards slavery, working with ordinary citizens, working with politicians, working with journalists. You can’t get to the end result of the Civil War and the restoration of America to its original promise without slavery if you don’t have both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. This man made a huge, important, positive difference.
Knowledge@Wharton: Let’s talk about Ernest Shackleton, the polar explorer who is shipwrecked on the ice. We’ve heard shipwreck stories before, but leadership is at the core of being able to overcome the worst situations.
Koehn: That’s exactly right and spot on, and that’s why it’s at the top of the book. It’s there for two reasons. One, this is such a stark example of what you just said. Against all odds, when the stakes could not be higher, you can accomplish the nearly impossible, just as he did. You read the story and keep turning the page, and you go, “It can’t keep getting worse. This can’t be this hard. He can’t be facing this roadblock.” And he keeps coming through them. He somehow keeps that resilience, that commitment to mission, that dedication. You read this and think, “Shackleton can teach us a lot about what we are capable of if we really access our core muscles of strength and courage.”
The second reason I put him at the top of the book is because most of us don’t know this story, and because it’s so gripping. It’s such a page turner.
Knowledge@Wharton: Give us more of the story of Rachel Carson.
Koehn: She’s the last person in the book and the only woman. As much as I fell in love with every one of these people, I have a very special place in my heart for her. She was born to poor parents and went to college in the 1920s, when most women didn’t go to college and most women didn’t complete college. If they did, they certainly weren’t biologists, as she was. They didn’t seek a living in science, as she did.
She quickly becomes the only breadwinner for her birth family, financially supporting and caretaking for her father, her mother, her brother, her sister, her nieces. At the same time, she’s getting a master’s in zoology at Johns Hopkins University and beginning a career that will ultimately marry this incredible poetic grace and beauty she has with language to her deep commitment to scientific rigor and truth in articles and books that make the natural world completely accessible to people, without dumbing down the science.
She pursues and marries these two gifts and nurtures them and learns all these things about herself while going home at night and putting her nieces to bed, making dinner, cleaning up and putting laundry in, like lots of women today. In the early 1950s, she writes a book called The Sea Around Us, about the majesty and importance and environmental diaspora of the ocean, in a way that every lay-reader can understand. It’s a bestseller, which gives her the freedom to leave her job at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, where she’s been doing all kinds of things for many years, mostly editorial content tasks and responsibilities.
She searches around for her next project and bumps into the issue of pesticides that are being used in huge, largely untested ways by farmers, big chemical companies and for household use.
The more she learns as she puts on her detective cap, the more anxious she gets, the more concerned she gets about the possible effects of this. A bit like lots of things we’ve discovered about chemicals and environmental dangers in our own lifetime.
She starts to piece together a very complicated, very serious, very high-stakes story about the dangers of these. She’s doing her homework painstakingly; it takes her years to do this. She’s double-, triple-, quadruple-checking everything. She’s very careful to not release anything before its time. But as people get wind of it, there are threats against her, threats against her family, because Dow Chemical and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and lots of places don’t want this story out there. Yet, she’s determined. She said, “I could never look myself in the face if I kept silent on this.” She has stumbled into her life’s work. At the same time, in the middle of her research and the beginnings of her writing, she is diagnosed with aggressive, metastasizing cancer.
The second half of the chapter is the story of her race against the clock and her commitment to do this work right and to get it out there in a way that will call for citizens to action on behalf of the Earth, not in an impractical and romantic way, but in a pragmatic and morally responsible way. It’s an astounding book that still sells many copies. And it’s a page-turner because she writes so well and she makes it so easy for us to understand, and she’s so careful.
BIG TECH´S BAD DAY / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
| Etiquetas: Investment Strategies, Technology Stocks
Big Tech’s Bad Day
The selloff in tech stocks Wednesday was less surprising than the rally in downtrodden names
By Dan Gallagher
VALUE TRAPPED
Price as multiple of forward wearnings
The rubber band snapped back.
A wave of selling hit technology stocks on Wednesday, which isn’t that surprising after their big run-up. What made the move potentially significant is the rebound in certain downtrodden stocks, which rose more than the tech giants fell.
The Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector Index, which contains the industry’s biggest names, fell by more than 3% Wednesday. That follows a gain of more than 40% this year compared with a 28% rise for the broader Nasdaq Composite. Several tech subgroups, such as chips, internet and software, were hit particularly hard.
Market watchers seemed perplexed by the sudden shift, but it was a day for doubts to creep in about frothy assets everywhere. Bitcoin, the red hot cryptocurrency that started the year worth around $1,000, cracked the psychologically significant $10,000 mark overnight and then $11,000 in early trading Wednesday before sinking to near $8,500 within hours.
Yet the day’s trading action wasn’t a classic risk-off moment, in which recently loved stocks or assets plunge and dowdy ones such as bonds or dividend-paying stocks represent a relative safe harbor. Instead, it was a swift and brutal rotation. The shares of companies that have been almost a mirror image of technology shares saw perhaps their best day of the year, even when they had nothing to do with one another.
Many of the names in question share two things in common—they had been doing as poorly as tech stocks had been doing well, and they are perceived to be vulnerable to the rise of Amazon.com. For example, home-goods retailer Bed Bath & Beyond rallied by as much as 8.5% after being down by 46% year-to-date through Tuesday, sporting goods chain Foot Locker rallied as much as 7% after having been down by 42% and drugstore chain Rite Aid was up by over 20% at one point but had been down by 77% for the year.
Amazon, by contrast, was down nearly 3% by the afternoon even as the company was unveiling the latest additions to its fast-growing AWS cloud service, as well as boasting of record sales during Cyber Monday. None of those was cause for disappointment. But Amazon’s share price had just tipped a fresh record high two days prior after having jumped 60% for the year. Its valuation of more than 190 times forward earnings proved a ripe target for skeptics.
A similar dynamic affects other big tech names. Investors have poured into megacap techs like Amazon, Facebook, Apple Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc. on the assumption that their massive scale will continue to accrue growth at the expense of older or more traditional competitors. That isn’t inaccurate, though the swelling valuations may also be ignoring the growing risk that scale brings—particularly in the form of lawmakers openly wondering if the sector is growing too powerful.
The risk of scrutiny remains hard to quantify but doesn’t yet seem priced in. The Nasdaq Composite is now averaging 23 times forward earnings—its highest multiple in at least 10 years. That isn’t yet a reason to flee the sector, but investors looking to lock in some profits clearly didn’t need much of a push.
SENATE CONSIDERS MAKING A TERRIBLE TAX BILL EVEN WORSE / THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
| Etiquetas: Tax and Economics, U.S. Economic And Political
Senate Considers Making a Terrible Tax Bill Even Worse
Credit Selman Design
This is how Senate Republicans compromise these days: They could make their enormously unpopular tax bill, which lavishes benefits on corporations and wealthy families, more generous to real estate tycoons and hedge fund billionaires to win over a couple of lawmakers who say the legislation doesn’t do enough for small businesses.
Even by the collapsing standards of Congress this is astounding. The change demanded by the two unhappy senators — Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Steve Daines of Montana — would further lower the tax bills of people like President Trump who earn most of their income through limited liability companies, partnerships and other “pass through” businesses that do not withhold taxes on the money passed along to their owners. About 70 percent of all pass-through income goes to people in the top 1 percent of Americans who receive any income whatsoever.
Under the Senate bill, business owners could claim a 17.4 percent deduction on their pass-through income before paying taxes. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Daines want a higher deduction, meaning that moguls would pay taxes on less of their earnings. It is conceivable that this could benefit some mom-and-pop businesses, but only modestly so. This is really about stuffing the pockets of people like Mr. Trump, who controls his real estate, licensing and hospitality empire through more than 500 pass-through businesses, according to his lawyers.
Forgotten in this deal-making are the millions of poor and middle-class families whose tax and health insurance premiums would rise under the Senate bill. Republican lawmakers keep talking about how middle-class families would see tax cuts of about $1,000, or about $19 dollars a week, but those cuts would last only a few years before expiring after 2025. By 2027, families making under $75,000 a year would on average pay more in taxes, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. All told, half of all taxpayers would pay more by that year and two-thirds of people in the middle 20 percent of the income distribution would pay more, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. People earning $40,000 to $50,000 would collectively lose $5.3 billion by paying more in taxes and receiving less in government spending in 2027 while millionaires would gain $5.8 billion, according to the Joint Committee and the Congressional Budget Office.
The bill would also repeal the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that most Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty. As a result, up to 13 million could lose coverage, and premiums would rise 10 percent a year for the next 10 years, the C.B.O. says. Senator Susan Collins of Maine has correctly noted that any temporary tax cuts for the middle class would be more than offset by the higher cost of health insurance — a good reason for her to vote against the bill.
Because it would cut corporate taxes so deeply — to 20 percent, from 35 percent — this bill would blow a huge hole in the federal budget. Over the next 10 years, it would add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit. That hole would have to be filled somehow, someday. That would probably mean even higher taxes on the middle class in the future and cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and other important government programs. Several Republican senators — Bob Corker of Tennessee, Jeff Flake of Arizona, James Lankford of Oklahoma and Jerry Moran of Kansas — have expressed concerns about the deficit. If they are genuinely troubled, they will uphold their demand that Congress not pass the buck for tax cuts to future generations and will vote no on this bill.
The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is trying to rush the bill to a vote by the end of the week. This self-imposed deadline is intended to give lawmakers and the public as little time as possible to analyze and understand the bill. The Senate has held no hearings on this legislation, which has been cooked up behind closed doors by Republicans without Democratic input.
Senator John McCain of Arizona gave a stirring speech in July about the need for the Senate to be “deliberative” and “bipartisan” during the debate about repealing the A.C.A. The mad dash to get a tax bill passed before Christmas has been a prime example of what Mr. McCain was railing against. If he stands for the principles he spoke about so eloquently, he will vote no on this bill, just as he did on the deeply flawed health care legislation.
Republican senators have a choice. They can follow the will of their donors and vote to take money from the middle class and give it to the wealthiest people in the world. Or they can vote no, to protect the public and the financial health of the government. There’s no compromise on that.
JAPAN´S RADICAL PURSUIT OF REVIVAL / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES
| Etiquetas: Asia Economic and Political, Japan
Japan’s Radical Pursuit of Revival
Japan is positioned to become East Asia’s foremost economic and military power in the coming decades, but it’s traveling a bumpy road to get there. Growing strategic challenges in its backyard related to China’s rise give it little choice but to push for a dominant role in the region, and it has the underlying fundamentals needed to do so. Yet at the same time, it is locked in a decades-long economic slump and is contending with a worsening demographic crisis – factors that could hinder its rise as a regional leader. And it is only beginning to shed the self-imposed pacifistic constraints that have blunted its military ambitions since World War II. Thus, at the moment, early indicators of Japan’s ascendance must be balanced against signs that it’s merely spinning its wheels.
Japan’s ambitions to break free from its internal limitations have become particularly acute under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government, which won re-election last month. Under Abe, Japan has been laying the groundwork to take a more decisive role in regional affairs by, for example, pushing to revise war-renouncing clauses in its pacifist constitution and modernize the military. Underpinning this strategy is a policy platform known as “Abenomics” — a radical and risky attempt to shock the economy out of the doldrums and, as a result, give Japan the capacity to develop true military clout.
This report takes stock of Japan’s unorthodox attempt at economic revival and examines how it fits into Tokyo’s geopolitical strategy — both its efforts to counter China’s growing economic and political influence in East Asia and its pursuit of a more robust military presence in the region. It makes the case that the Abenomics approach, particularly its focus on aggressive monetary easing, is already bolstering Japan’s regional influence, despite only mixed success at reviving the economy at home. However, the pace and scale of Japan’s remilitarization will hinge on the economy’s ability to exit stagnation without triggering a debt or financial crisis.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (front row, center) and his Cabinet members walk down the stairs following their first Cabinet meeting at Abe’s official residence in Tokyo on Nov. 1, 2017. KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images
Abenomics Explained
If Japan appears to be throwing a Hail Mary under Abe, it’s because the country has been mired in an interminable economic slump triggered by a massive asset bubble collapse in 1990 — an extended period of stagnation that has made a mockery of its original moniker, “The Lost Decade.” Between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, economic growth flatlined as Japanese banks tightened credit, average land values plummeted by some 70 percent, and a deflationary cycle set in. Powerhouse electronics and auto exporters lost ground to competitors from emerging neighbors such as South Korea. And just when Japanese growth was returning to pre-crisis levels, the economy was slammed by the global financial crisis beginning in 2008. By 2012, real wages were still roughly 5 percent below their 1995 peak.
Meanwhile, Japan has been grappling with an inexorable demographic crisis. The country has had the world’s oldest population since the mid-2000s, and the problem is only getting worse. Last year, annual births fell below 1 million for the first time, while deaths reached a postwar high of around 1.3 million. Over the next 40 years, Japan’s population is expected to fall to just 92 million people, down from a peak of 128 million in 2015. Retiring workers aren’t being replaced, hurting productivity and weighing on consumer demand. It also heightens the strain on Tokyo’s coffers, with a greater share of the budget having to go to pensions and health care. Moreover, the Japanese public has historically been staunchly opposed to opening the country to immigration, making it difficult to fill gaps in the workforce.
Abenomics aims to address some of these problems. It is based around three “arrows.” The first is aggressive monetary easing, with the Bank of Japan printing yen and buying its own sovereign bonds at a breakneck pace to keep the currency weak (and thus support domestic exporting industries), ensure firms have ample access to credit and boost inflation to a healthy level (to encourage consumers to spend). The second arrow is fiscal stimulus, using targeted government spending to promote consumer demand. The third is a sweeping set of structural reforms, including labor, tax and regulatory overhauls, with the goal of boosting the competitiveness of Japanese firms against foreign rivals and softening the demographic crisis by, for example, nudging women into the workforce.
In practice, however, Abe has leaned most on the first arrow: monetary easing. This is, in large part, because it’s the easiest policy to implement. Abe’s government, via his like-minded central bank chief, Haruhiko Kuroda, has been able to prime the pump at will since 2012. The central bank’s buying spree of Japanese government bonds has left it with a balance sheet with more than 500 trillion yen ($4.4 trillion) in assets. At the beginning of 2016, Japan introduced negative interest rates on some commercial bank deposits, and it has kept 10-year bond yields at about zero, to push savings into the real economy.
In comparison, structural reforms tend to be long-term projects that inevitably face resistance from affected interest groups. Or they conflict with cultural norms and thus can fall victim to more immediate political concerns. The government can do only so much to improve labor mobility, for example, in a culture that places high value on career-long loyalty to a single employer. Convincing people to have more babies is not exactly in any government’s wheelhouse.
Similarly, since fiscal stimulus measures also must be passed through Japan’s parliament, they likewise are subject to getting twisted for political aims, watering down their potential economic impact. Stimulus spending is also constrained by concerns over Japan’s soaring debt, which is forcing Tokyo to devote an increasing share of the budget to debt servicing. In 2014, for example, Abe’s own Ministry of Finance balked at plans for additional stimulus spending, leading instead to a 2 percent consumption tax hike that largely undid the wage gains of the previous two years and sent the economy into recession. This year — despite it being an election year — focus has again returned to paying down debt.
The result has been a tangible but fragile recovery. Corporate profits hit a historical high in the first half of this year, accompanied by a surge in corporate capital expenditures. A tightening labor market has pushed unemployment below 3 percent. The economy has grown for seven consecutive quarters, its second-longest growth streak since World War II, and there are signs that inflation is on the verge of finally ticking upward.
But this has yet to translate into success by many of the government’s own metrics. Inflation remains well below the central bank’s target of 2 percent. And the bank admits it is unlikely to get there until a tightening labor market pushes up wages and the costs are passed onto consumers; this is how modest inflation occurs in a healthy economy. The labor market has tightened somewhat, but wages have shown only scant signs of increasing, and household spending remains low. Moreover, with government debt hovering around 250 percent of gross domestic product, the Abe government feels it has little choice but to finally move forward with another consumption tax hike, from 8 percent to 10 percent. Though its debt risk is somewhat mitigated by the fact that most of the debt is held by the domestic market or the central bank, Tokyo is playing a costly game that’s eating into government coffers and exposing the market to more violent swings whenever rates begin to rise again. Meanwhile, Japan’s labor force isn’t getting any younger.
Still, time and again, Japan has shown a remarkable resilience to crisis, as well as a remarkable ability to take on radical transitions without collapsing into major social upheaval. Even the slump of the past quarter century has been notable as much for its social stability as its stagnation – a resilience that countries like China deeply envy. Despite the depth and longevity of the Lost Decade, Japan has yet to lose the confidence of outside investors. And Japanese firms remain world leaders in artificial intelligence research, automation and robotics, the sorts of technologies that will help the country sustain productivity amid the demographics crunch. This is why Tokyo has been emboldened to take such extreme measures in the first place. Our bet is Japan finds a way to pull through on the homefront yet again.
Reaching Abroad
Abenomics was never solely about reviving the domestic economy. And on the foreign policy front, there’s an overlooked ancillary benefit of this approach, particularly the emphasis on monetary easing: It plays directly into Japan’s regional strategy.
Simply put, between the abundance of cheap credit and sky-high corporate profits, Japan’s economy is awash in capital. With Tokyo doing everything it can to discourage savings, much of this liquidity needs to go somewhere, and the Japanese consumer market and industrial footprint can absorb only so much. Thus, a record amount of Japanese capital is heading overseas, at a time when Tokyo is keen to help weaker states avoid becoming overly dependent on China’s surging foreign aid and outbound investment. Annual Japanese outbound foreign direct investment has increased nearly 58 percent since 2011, according to figures from the Japan External Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Meanwhile, overseas mergers and acquisitions by Japanese companies hit an all-time high in 2015, according to Thomson Reuters.
Japan’s neighbors have not been the only beneficiaries; a majority of Japanese investment over the past seven years has gone to either the U.S. or Europe, as well as adjacent manufacturing hubs like Mexico. But East Asian economies, particularly in Southeast Asia, have certainly enjoyed a hearty slice of the pie. Japanese FDI in members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations tripled from 2011 to 2015, to more than 20 trillion yen. Through the first half of 2017, this figure was up again by around 2.3 percent, compared to the same period a year earlier. The heaviest focus has been on Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia — all either parties to the South China Sea dispute or historical contributors to the U.S.-alliance structure in the Western Pacific. Japan is also investing heavily in Myanmar, which is at the center of the burgeoning competition between China and India, as well as India itself. Meanwhile, as Japanese firms have been increasingly moving operations out of China over the past decade, the largest share of them have headed to Southeast Asia.
The Japanese corporate sector is uniquely equipped to put this money to use in the region. Japanese supply chains have crisscrossed the globe for half a century, as Japanese firms were among the first to move operations to countries with lower labor costs. The stresses of the Lost Decade only cemented Japan’s outbound strategy as it sought to reduce the dependence of its economy on the domestic consumer market. (In fact, though Japan’s economy remains heavily dependent on exports, it has been increasingly relying on earnings from investments abroad. Its primary income account, which gauges how much Japan profits from FDI, has soared by as much as 65 percent since 2012, while its trade surplus has been more volatile.)
As a result, Japanese firms play outsize roles in emerging economies like those of Southeast Asia, with Japan’s aims largely seen as complementary to those of regional governments. This is because Japanese firms are viewed as critical job creators and inherently supportive of local efforts to move up the manufacturing value chains and build a middle class. (Japanese investment fueled the modernization of Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia, in particular.) Moreover, the high-tech Japanese products being assembled in middle-income countries, particularly electronic components and auto parts, don’t usually compete with goods made by local firms – unlike lower-end Chinese goods – easing Tokyo’s ability to strike favorable economic pacts with Asian governments. Japanese firms aren’t viewed as a threat to local workers for importing their own – a common, if overstated, accusation against Chinese firms. And Japanese technology and expertise in areas like high-speed rail is viewed as unmatched, giving Japan an edge (albeit hardly a decisive one) in Southeast Asia, a geographically fragmented region that, according to the Asian Development Bank, needs to spend some $60 billion on infrastructure annually until 2030 to sustain its economic growth.
Compared to their Chinese competitors, Japanese firms also don’t have to contend as much with ethnic complications in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where minority ethnic Chinese populations are often scapegoated by populist political movements. (On the flip side, the dominance of ethnic Chinese populations over various local sectors in Southeast Asia can often give mainland Chinese firms a substantial leg up against other foreign competitors.) Lingering memories of Japanese imperialism notwithstanding, Japanese firms also do not face political blowback related to territorial disputes, unlike, for example, the Chinese businesses that were the target of South China Sea-linked riots in Vietnam in 2014.
To amplify the political influence accrued through FDI, Tokyo has long actively relied on official development assistance, or ODA, to channel funding to sectors prioritized by partner governments, particularly infrastructure. (It uses its influence in the Asian Development Bank, every president of which has been Japanese, for similar aims.) And under Abe, coordination of ODA with the private sector has increased substantially and taken on a more strategic bent. From a commercial perspective, private sector involvement in ODA is becoming particularly important to Japanese firms’ ability to remain competitive in certain sectors, since Beijing is encouraging Chinese state-owned firms to underbid competitors – even at terms likely to prove unprofitable – on big ticket road, rail and port projects that support China’s strategic imperatives.
Abenomics and Hard Power
It’s difficult to gauge how much soft power tools such as aid and investment really matter on the geopolitical stage. Even relatively poor countries like the Philippines rarely willingly subsume their core security imperatives to their economic interests, even if their military weakness leaves them with little choice but to try to exploit regional competition between stronger powers for economic benefit. Cultivating political influence through aid and investment is only one part of Tokyo’s regional strategy. Japan’s ability to ramp up defense spending and security assistance to the region matters more. But this requires Tokyo to find a way to put its economy on sound long-term footing.
Since 1961, Japan has spent no more than 1 percent of its GDP on its military annually. Its budget is nothing to sniff at – in 2016, it was seventh-highest in the world in dollar terms. And it has given the military sophisticated defensive capabilities, such as a world-class submarine fleet (designed for operations in Japan’s near abroad), missile defense systems and a burgeoning fleet of F-35 fighter jets. But Japan’s military has little in the way of expensive offensive capabilities, particularly in the maritime realm, despite steps in this direction over the past decade.
For the time being, at least, it can continue to lean heavily on the U.S. to cover its deficiencies. (In fact, by allowing Japan to limit defense spending for decades following World War II, U.S. security guarantees contributed directly to the postwar economic dynamism Japan is now trying to revive.) But going forward, we expect emerging threats in Japan’s backyard, along with its perpetual uneasiness with tying its fate to U.S. defense guarantees, to compel Tokyo to shed its pacifist political and legal constraints on taking greater responsibility for its defense needs. This spring, in fact, Abe’s government formally scrapped the 1 percent of GDP cap on defense spending. And this summer, the Japanese Defense Ministry requested another 2.5 percent increase in spending for the 2018 fiscal year, to $48.1 billion, with an eye on defensive-oriented assets such as additional ballistic missile defense systems, fighter jets and anti-mine ships.
Over the long term, Japan will push to address its vulnerabilities farther afield as well, particularly in the maritime realm. Its dependence on the free flow of energy imports through the Malacca Strait and South China Sea makes mitigating threats to the waters, whether from new Chinese warships or dinghy-bound pirates, a matter of existential importance for the Japanese. Toward this end, Japan is gradually ramping up security assistance to weaker states locked in maritime disputes with the Chinese, particularly the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. It is also boosting maritime cooperation with like-minded regional powers Australia, India and Singapore to prepare for the possibility that the U.S. becomes tied down with a crisis and cannot play its role as guarantor of seaborne trade.
All this costs vast amounts of money. Building from the ground up a bluewater navy capable of securing the Malacca and potentially coming to the aid of India or Southeast Asian states would be particularly expensive. A capital-rich economy will aid in this endeavor to a degree as the appetite for investment in Japan’s indigenous arms sector grows. Japan’s high-tech sector has certainly given the country the technological skill base and industrial footprint needed to develop top-end defense systems at home, thus allowing it to rely less on arms imports and even develop a more robust arms exports industry of its own. (Abe formally lifted a ban on Japanese arms exports in 2014.) In this environment, a greater share of Japanese defense spending would be recycled through the broader domestic economy.
Nonetheless, the ability to shovel money into defense in perpetuity requires not just cheap credit but also a fiscal outlook that can accommodate the military’s needs alongside the yawning demands of Japan’s elderly and its public debtholders. And the political and economic fallout of a financial crisis triggered by the debt risks that accompany the Abenomics approach could very well stall Japan’s remilitarization altogether.
The Abenomics experiment remains inconclusive, both on the homefront and abroad. Thus, the trajectory of Japan’s fledgling re-emergence as a dominant regional power is also uncertain. But Japan’s history of radical transformation, industrial edge and social cohesion give us pause before counting the country out. We’ll dive deeper into each of the pivotal variables we outlined in this report – particularly the demographic crunch, Tokyo’s defense spending capacity, and its vulnerability to renewed crisis if the debt load proves unmanageable – in the future, as we track Japan’s peculiar revival.
THE "GOLDEN AGE OF GAS" IS OVER / BARRON´S MAGAZINE
| Etiquetas: Natural Gas
The “Golden Age of Gas” Is Over
By Jack Hough
Illustration: Getty Images
The golden age of natural gas is ending, and coal isn’t headed for a comeback. Both will quickly cede market share in U.S. power generation to wind and solar, which will be cheaper than fossil fuels by the end of the decade, especially as technology for electricity storage improves. That’s bad news for General Electric (ticker: GE), which has plenty of exposure to gas turbines. It’s good for Honeywell (HON), Hubbell (HUBB) and Wesco (WCC), which supply equipment for distributing renewable energy and modernizing the electricity grid.
The prediction comes from J.P. Morgan’s Stephen Tusa, who shares his bearish view of GE in this week’s Barron’s magazine. Tusa recently spent two days in meetings with 14 utilities at a conference hosted by Edison Electric Institute, a trade group. Among his takeaways: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (7011.Japan) seems to be gaining traction relative to GE in turbines. But renewables are clearly where the growth is.
Consider the outlook for Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy (XEL). In 2005, it generated 56% of its power from coal, 23% from gas and 3% from renewables. By last year, coal had dropped to 37%, gas had grown to 25% and renewables were up to 20%. That period marked the “golden age of gas’” according to Tusa. Political rhetoric aside, coal’s decline has had less to do with government regulation than with new drilling technology that has unlocked vast supplies of gas from U.S. shale. A decade from now, however, gas could be relegated to serving as a fill-in power source, like coal. Xcel, for example, plans by 2027 to generate 20% of power from coal, just 17% from gas and 47% from renewables. Many other power companies make similar predictions.
One reason is that renewable power costs have fallen 70% since 2010 and could drop another 20% to 25% by 2020, becoming competitive with fossil fuels. Another is that power companies are quickly investing in electricity storage. AES (AES), based in Arlington, Va., has a joint venture with Siemens (SIE.Germany) to take storage capacity to 30 gigawatts in five years from just three today. In other words, batteries have already spread from powering smartphones to weed whackers to, increasingly, electric cars. Homes will be next, and that’s a long-term concern for gas investors.
THE BONFIRE BURNS ON / JOHN MAULDIN´S WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
| Etiquetas: Cash, Economics, Interest Rates, Investment Strategies, U.S. Economic And Political
The Bonfire Burns On
“Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know, that they do not touch him; but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”
Bonfires are fun to watch, but they eventually burn out. Human folly apparently doesn’t, so we just keep adding to the absurdities. The volume of daily economic lunacy that lights up my various devices is truly stunning, and it seems to be increasing. I shared a little of it with you in last week’s “Bonfire of the Absurdities.” Since it’s a holiday weekend and I was traveling all week, today I’ll just give you a few more absurdities to ponder. And this shorter letter will lighten your weekend reading load.
First, let me thank everyone who took my advice to register early for my next Strategic Investment Conference, March 6–9, 2018, in San Diego. Hundreds of you are now confirmed to attend. I know many more intend to do so. Sadly, we can’t accommodate an unlimited number of you. I can’t say when we will reach capacity, but I hope it is soon. I am in negotiations right now with a very familiar name whose economic views are, shall we say, different from mine. Our idea is to debate those differences in front of an audience. Fireworks will likely ensue. But, to get this to happen, I need some numbers to line up. You can help by registering for the conference now. Click here for more information.
Now, on with the absurdities.
Leverage, American Style
When I asked my “kitchen cabinet” of friends for instances of the absurd, Grant Williams sent a monumental slide deck. I guess I should have expected that, as the absurd is one of his specialties. My computer almost melted trying to download the deck, but it finally finished and was worth the wait. Here is just one example of craziness.
This chart is straightforward: It’s outstanding credit as a percentage of GDP. Broadly speaking, this is a measure of how leveraged the US economy is. It was in a sedate 130%–170% range as the economy industrialized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It popped higher in the 1920s and 1930s before settling down again. Then came the 1980s. Credit jumped above 200% of GDP and has never looked back. It climbed steadily until 2009 and now hovers over 350%.
Absurd doesn’t do this situation justice. We are mind-bogglingly leveraged. And consider what the chart doesn’t show. Many individuals and businesses carry no debt at all, or certainly less than 350% leverage. That means many others must be leveraged far higher.
Now, the usual economic pundits tell us that the situation is safe and under control and that we all have plenty of cash and cash flow to be able to handle this load of debt. Worrying about debt is so 1900s, they say. And they may have a point, in that many of us are able to use debt in responsible ways. But how about that $1.2 trillion in student debt?
While lending has been a very lucrative business in recent decades, it’s hard to believe it can last. At some point we must experience a great deleveraging. When that happens, it won’t be fun.
Against the Crowd
“Contrarian” investors believe success lies in going against the crowd, because the crowd is usually wrong. That is often a very good assumption. My own experience suggests one small adjustment: Pay attention not to what the crowd says but to what it does. Words are cheap.
This next chart is a prime example. We see here the amount of cash held by Merrill Lynch clients from 2005 to the present, as a percentage of their assets. The average is about 13%.
Of course, people hold cash for all kinds of reasons that don’t necessarily reflect their market outlook. Nor does this chart tell us how their non-cash assets were allocated. The pattern is nevertheless uncanny. In 2007, as stock indexes reached their peak, cash holdings were well below average. They rose quickly as the crisis unfolded, peaking almost exactly with the market low in early 2009.
In other words, at the very time when it would have been best to reduce cash and buy equities, Merrill Lynch clients did the opposite. And when they should have been raising cash, they kept their holdings low. I don’t think this pattern is unique to Merrill Lynch’s clients; I suspect we would see the same at most retail brokerages. Market timing is hard for everyone.
The disturbing part is where the chart ends. Merrill Lynch client cash allocations are now even lower than they were at that 2007 trough. Interest rates are much lower, too, so maybe that’s not surprising. Central banks spent the last decade all but forcing investors to buy risk assets and shun cash. This data suggests it worked. But whatever the reason, investor cash levels suggest that caution is quite unpopular right now. So if you consider yourself a contrarian, maybe it’s time to raise some cash.
Michael Lewitt’s latest letter came in this morning. He began with the marvelous Ralph Waldo Emerson quote that I used at the beginning of this letter, and then he helpfully contributed this list of absurdities:
Anyone questioning whether financial markets are in a bubble should consider what we witnessed in 2017:
• A painting (which may be fake) sold for $450 million.
• Bitcoin (which may be worthless) soared nearly 700% from $952 to ~$8000.
• The Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank bought $2 trillion of assets.
• Global debt rose above $225 trillion to more than 324% of global GDP.
• US corporations sold a record $1.75 trillion in bonds.
• European high-yield bonds traded at a yield under 2%.
• Argentina, a serial defaulter, sold 100-year bonds in an oversubscribed offer.
• Illinois, hopelessly insolvent, sold 3.75% bonds to bondholders fighting for allocations.
• Global stock market capitalization skyrocketed by $15 trillion to over $85 trillion and a record 113% of global GDP.
• The market cap of the FANGs increased by more than $1 trillion.
• S&P 500 volatility dropped to 50-year lows and Treasury volatility to 30-year lows.
• Money-losing Tesla Inc. sold 5% bonds with no covenants as it burned $4+ billion in cash and produced very few cars.
This is a joyless bubble, however. It is accompanied by political divisiveness and social turmoil as the mainstream media hectors the populace with fake news. Immoral behavior that was tolerated for years is finally called to account while a few brave journalists fight against establishment forces to reveal deep corruption at the core of our government (yes, I am speaking of Uranium One and the Obama Justice Department). In 2018, a lot of chickens are going to come home to roost in Washington, D.C., on Wall Street, and in the media centers of New York City and Los Angeles. Icons will be blasted into dust as the tides of cheap money, cronyism, complicity, and stupidity recede. Beware entities with too much debt, too much secrecy, too much hype. Beware false idols. Every bubble destroys its idols, and so shall this one.
Liquidity Lost
The next absurdity is absurd because it is so obvious, yet many don’t want to see it. Too bad, because I’m going to make you look. This comes from Michael Lebowitz of 720 Global. It’s the S&P 500 Index overlaid with the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and the forecast of where the Federal Reserve intends to take its balance sheet.
As I noted above, the Fed and other central banks have practically forced investors into risk assets since 2008. You can see the relationship very clearly in this chart. The green segments of the S&P 500’s rise occurred during quantitative easing programs. Correlation isn’t causation, but I think we can safely draw some connections here.
Ample low-cost liquidity drives asset prices higher. That’s not controversial. It makes perfect sense that the withdrawal of ample low-cost liquidity would also impact asset prices in the opposite direction.
The Fed has even given us a schedule by which it will unwind its balance sheet. Michael’s chart gives us a sense of how far the S&P 500 could drop if the Fed unwinds as planned and if the relationship between liquidity and stock prices persists. Either or both of those could change; but if they don’t, the S&P 500 could fall 50% in the next few years.
At the risk of repeating myself, I think it is borderline dysfunctional for the Fed to be raising interest rates and at the same time experimenting with reducing its balance sheet. Where’s the fire? Seriously, we waited for four years, deep into the recovery, before the Fed found enough intestinal fortitude to begin to timidly raise rates. And now they think they have to proceed at warp speed? I just don’t see this ending well.
What would be really absurd, I submit, would be to see this data and then somehow convince yourself that stock prices can keep climbing or even merely hold steady as the prime mover that drove them higher moves in the opposite direction.
Mobbing the Exits
Another peculiar wrinkle in the situation today is that many investors see all these warning signs but think they can keep riding the market higher and hedge against losses at the same time. It doesn’t really work that way. However, it’s easy to see why people think they can get away with it. Wall Street firms have rolled out all kinds of volatility-linked products that purport to protect you from sudden downside events.
In various ways, most of these products are linked to the Volatility Index, or VIX. Volatility has been persistently low as the market has risen in recent years. That has made it cheap to buy protection against a volatility spike. However, it’s not clear if the sellers of this protection will be able to deliver as promised.
My friend Doug Kass has been concerned about this for some time. He believes the risks of a “flash crash” are rising, and those who think they are hedged may learn that they are not. He shared this Morgan Stanley graphic of how many VIX futures contracts would have to be bought to cover a one-day market drop.
Between hedgers, dealers, and ETP sponsors, a one-day 5% downward spike in the S&P 500 would force the purchase of over 400,000 VIX futures contracts. This was in October, and the figure has probably risen more since then. Doug isn’t sure a market under that kind of stress can deliver that much liquidity.
Every market downturn seems to expose the vacuity of some new, sophisticated hedging product. In 1987 it was “portfolio insurance.” Whatever the particulars, the schemes all purport to let investors ride the market higher without taking on meaningful downside risk. That is not how hedging works. I suspect the various VIX-linked products will disappoint buyers when the unwind occurs.
Doug also shared what will be the final graph for this week and observed, “This is the dreaded alligator formation, and the jaws always close.” It’s just a matter of time. It could take another year and get even sillier, but when that gator snaps its jaws shut, a lot of people will get bitten. I personally think the bubble in high-yield debt, accompanied by so much covenant-lite offerings, will be the source of the next true liquidity crisis.
The amount of money available to market makers to use to maintain some type of order in a falling high-yield market is absurdly low. Investors in high-yield mutual funds and ETFs think they have liquidity, but the managers of those funds will be forced to sell into a market where there is no price and there are no bids. Oh, the bids will show up at 50% discounts. Distressed-debt funds and vulture capital will see opportunities, and they will be there. Talk about blood in the streets.
And with this list of fun topics on Thanksgiving weekend, I will leave you to your ruminations.
Home for Christmas, then Hong Kong
Other than a brief trip here and there – and who knows what will slip into the schedule – I will be home for most of December. This Thursday Shane and I fly to Tulsa to see my newest granddaughter, Brinlee Porter, who will be brought into the world by her mother Amanda on Tuesday. Amanda’s sister Abigail and another granddaughter are staying with us this weekend and will return to Tulsa tomorrow.
Shane and I will be in Hong Kong for the Bank of America Merrill Lynch conference in early January. That trip will be made even more fun because Lacy Hunt and his wife JK will be there with us. We are going to take an extra day or two and be tourists. I’ve been to Hong Kong many times but have never really gotten out of the business district. Well, Louis Gave did pick me up in his old-fashioned Chinese junk and took me around to the other side of the island to the yacht club, where we had dinner. The water got a little choppy, and I got a little seasick, so I was grateful for the car ride back. But it was really quite a beautiful outing. I very much like Hong Kong.
One of the things that I will be doing in Hong Kong is getting some new dress shirts. My workouts the past year or so have focused a lot more on my shoulders and shrugs, and I have actually added a full inch to my neck size. I have literally only one shirt that I can (barely) button to be able to wear a tie with. I have been waiting for the Hong Kong trip, because you can get a custom shirt made in just a few days, remarkably cheaply. I’m not sure that will mean I’ll be wearing more ties, but at least I will be able to do so comfortably when the need arises.
Lugano, Switzerland, was beautiful. We were with my associate Tony Courtney, and he drove us to the Lake Como area for lunch on Sunday, negotiating all the switchback roads to the accompaniment of his playlist of James Bond movie tunes, which, while appropriate, also affected his driving style. I was glad when we got to the restaurant and could sit still and breathe deeply. But it was fun. And the weather was marvelous.
I spoke to a number of Swiss money managers and family offices while I was at the conference, and I can tell you there was not a sense of complacency. They were all very nervous and not quite sure what to do – not unlike many of my readers. We took an informal poll, and a majority of the attendees felt that the Swiss National Bank’s balance sheet would top $1 trillion in less than a year. They are goosing it in order to keep a lid on the Swiss franc. Interestingly, 65% of the attendees felt that the SNB should not be buying US equities (it now owns more than 3% of Apple, for instance); and while this audience earns their keep by managing money for mostly non-Swiss clients, they were all concerned about the continued strength of the Swiss currency and wondering how long it can remain so strong.
Still, one way or another, we will all Mudadle Through. And as I hit the send button, I am noticing one of the anomalies of my life in a high-rise in what is essentially downtown Dallas (although technically the locals call it Uptown). The high-rise apartment building some 100 yards away from me has a pair of nesting red-winged hawks that have lived there for the last two or three years. The male actually landed on my balcony once, and I’ve often thought about putting out some meat to see if I could attract him back, as seeing him up close is magnificent. The weather is perfect, and I see as I glance out that the pair are doing an aerial dance. I think I’ll walk out on the balcony with a book and just watch. You have a great week!
Your enjoying the little things in life analyst,
ADJUSTING THE CAPE MEASURE: EQUITY VALUATIONS ARE ...
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Paul F. Koeppe
Paul F. Koeppe was President, CEO and founder of Superconductivity, Inc., a manufacturer of superconducting magnetic energy storage systems from 1988 to 1997 when it was acquired by American Superconductor, an electricity solutions company. He then served as Executive Vice President of Strategic Planning for American Superconductor until his retirement in 2001. From 1993 to 1995, Paul was acting CEO and chairman of the executive committee of the board of directors of Best Power, Inc., a supplier of uninterruptible power supply equipment. Beginning August 2009, he serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Audit Committee for ZBB Energy Corporation, a manufacturer of large capacity energy storage systems, and served as Interim CEO from November 2009 until January 2010. Mr. Koeppe has also served as a Director of Distributed Energy Systems Corp., a public company engaged in the business of creating and delivering products and services to the energy marketplace and also as a Director of Northern Power Systems from 1998 to until 2003 when Northern was acquired by Distributed Energy Systems Corp. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration and Associate Degrees in Materials Management and Electrical Power Technology. Mr. Koeppe now serves as the chairman of the audit committee of ZBB Energy Corporation, which (together with his other experience) brings significant financial experience to our Board, as well as experience with sound corporate governance and internal control policies. Furthermore, his substantial experience as an executive officer followed by board service provides to us executive and employee compensation experience that we depend on to guide the policies we establish for compensating and incentivizing our employees.
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Virgin Mobile USA Reports $98 Million in Adjusted EBITDA Excluding Transition and Restructuring Expenses(1) for the First Six Months of 2009
Hybrid Gross Customer Additions Increase 20% Year Over Year in the First Half of 2009WARREN, NJ, Aug 10, 2009 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. (NYSE: VM), a leading national provider of wireless communications services, today reported its financial and operational results for the three and six months ended June 30, 2009.
Second quarter 2009 highlights:
Net service revenue of $290.0 million compared to $293.8 million in the second quarter of 2008
Adjusted EBITDA of $43.9 million compared to $32.3 million in the second quarter of 2008, up 36%; Adjusted EBITDA excluding transition and restructuring expenses was $45.0 million compared to $33.4 million in the second quarter of 2008, up 35%(1)
Net income of $21.8 million compared to net income of $5.5 million in the second quarter of 2008, up 296%
Earnings per diluted share of $0.23 compared to $0.07 in the second quarter of 2008, up 229% year over year; Adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.27(1); compared to earnings per diluted share of $0.08(1) in the second quarter of 2008, up 238%
First half 2009 highlights:
Net service revenue of $608.1 million compared to $600.8 million in the first half of 2008
Adjusted EBITDA of $93.4 million compared to $61.0 million in the first half of 2008, up 53%; Adjusted EBITDA excluding transition and restructuring expenses was $97.6 million compared to $62.1 million in the first half of 2008, up 57%(1)
Net income of $40.9 million compared to net income of $10.3 million in the first half of 2008, up 299%
Earnings per diluted share of $0.42 compared to $0.16 in the first half of 2008, up 163% year over year; Adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.51 compared to $0.17 in the first half of 2008, up 200%(1)
Free cash flow of $29.0 million compared to $29.2 million in the first half of 2008
(1) Excludes transition and restructuring expenses related to the acquisition of Helio, the outsourcing of IT services to IBM and workforce reductions totaling $1.2 million and $4.2 million for the three and six months ended June 30, 2009, respectively and $1.1 million for the three and six months ended June 30, 2008. Adjusted earnings per share also excludes the amortization of intangibles associated with the acquisition of Helio. Adjustments to earnings per share are net of noncontrolling interest and taxes.
"Our financial results in the first half of the year have exceeded our expectations," said Dan Schulman, Chief Executive Officer, Virgin Mobile USA. "We grew Adjusted EBITDA excluding transition and restructuring expenses by 57% to $98 million in the first half of 2009, producing Free cash flow of more than $29 million. We continue to exceed our financial expectations and remain confident in our guidance for Adjusted EBITDA and Free cash flow for the full year 2009."
"Our stated strategy is to focus on growing our highly profitable hybrid customer base. We made strong progress against this goal in the second quarter. Hybrid gross adds grew from 55% of total gross adds in Q1 to 63% in Q2, resulting in 20% year over year growth in total hybrid gross customer additions in the first half of 2009," continued Schulman. "The growth of our hybrid customers, who have more than 15x the lifetime value of our average pay-by-the-minute customers, has been supported by the launch of our new service plans throughout the second quarter. Our new $49.99 Unlimited offer has been particularly successful, representing 21% of all gross adds in May and June. We expect continued hybrid growth with the plans now fully deployed into retail in Q3.
"Supporting this strategic customer focus is the sale of higher-priced handsets, which are associated with higher data usage, better churn, and significantly higher lifetime value. Our sales of handsets priced at $50 and above leapt to 25% of total sales from 15% in just one quarter, reflecting the success of our strategy and our commitment to high quality growth."
Overview and Basis of Presentation
Financial results for Helio are included in Virgin Mobile USA's results beginning on August 22, 2008. This press release uses several financial performance metrics, including Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA margin, Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), Cash Cost Per User (CCPU), Cost Per Gross Addition (CPGA), Free cash flow, Adjusted EBITDA excluding transition and restructuring expenses and Adjusted EBITDA margin excluding transition and restructuring expenses, Adjusted EPS excluding the amortization of intangibles associated with the acquisition of Helio and Adjusted EPS excluding the amortization of intangibles associated with the acquisition of Helio, and transition and restructuring expenses which are not calculated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States, or GAAP. The Company believes that these non-GAAP financial metrics are helpful in understanding its operating performance from period to period and, although not every wireless company uses these metrics or defines these metrics in the same way, the Company believes that these metrics as used by Virgin Mobile USA facilitate comparisons with other wireless service providers. These metrics should not be considered substitutes for any performance metrics determined in accordance with GAAP. For a reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures, please refer to the section entitled "Definition of Terms and Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Financial Measures" included at the end of this release.
Key Financial & Operating Results for the Second Quarter of 2009
Three Months Ended Six Months Ended
June 30, June 30,
-------------------- --------------------
2009 2008 2009 2008
--------- --------- --------- ---------
($ in thousands, except per
share amounts) (Unaudited) (Unaudited)
Net service revenue $ 289,965 $ 293,824 $ 608,064 $ 600,814
Total operating revenue 307,565 319,864 644,853 649,881
Operating income 30,890 19,981 67,098 36,584
Net income 21,825 5,506 40,885 10,255
Adjusted EBITDA 43,852 32,321 93,395 61,023
Adjusted EBITDA margin 15.1% 11.0% 15.4% 10.2%
Adjusted EBITDA, excluding
transition and restructuring
expenses(1) 45,022 33,372 97,593 62,074
Adjusted EBITDA margin,
excluding transition and
restructuring expenses (1) 15.5% 11.4% 16.0% 10.3%
Net income attributable to
Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. per
common share - basic $ 0.26 $ 0.07 $ 0.47 $ 0.16
common share - diluted $ 0.23 $ 0.07 $ 0.42 $ 0.16
Adjusted earnings per common
share - diluted(1) $ 0.26 $ 0.07 $ 0.48 $ 0.16
excluding amortization of
intangible assets, and
expenses - diluted(1) $ 0.27 $ 0.08 $ 0.51 $ 0.17
Interest expense - net 5,120 7,933 10,707 17,272
Capital expenditures 7,572 9,364
(1) Excludes transition and restructuring expenses related to the
acquisition of Helio, the outsourcing of IT services to IBM and
workforce reductions totaling $1.2 million and $4.2 million for the
three and six months ended June 30, 2009, respectively and $1.1 million
for the three and six months ended June 30, 2008. Adjusted earnings per
share also excludes the amortization of intangibles associated with the
acquisition of Helio. Adjustments to earnings per share are net of
noncontrolling interest and taxes. The three and six months ended
June 30, 2008 did not have amortization of intangibles.
(Unaudited) (Unaudited)
Gross additions 535,558 728,370 1,165,817 1,523,945
Churn 5.3% 5.6% 5.0% 5.3%
Net customer additions (269,239) (111,273) (402,531) (93,501)
End-of-period customers 4,977,779 4,992,385 4,977,779 4,992,385
ARPU $ 18.98 $ 19.49 $ 19.54 $ 19.82
CCPU $ 12.12 $ 11.87 $ 12.46 $ 12.05
CPGA $ 113.65 $ 113.38 $ 108.82 $ 114.53
Free cash flow (in thousands) $ 29,029 $ 29,209
During the second quarter of 2009, Virgin Mobile USA's net service revenue was $290.0 million, down 1% versus the same period in 2008. Virgin Mobile USA's net service revenue in the first half of 2009 was $608.1 million, up 1% compared to $600.8 million in the first half of 2008. Net service revenue in the second quarter was impacted by customer optimization as customers migrated to lower priced plans, including migrations to our new $49.99 unlimited plan. These migrations of higher-priced unlimited customers to the new unlimited plan are expected to be completed by the end of the year. Net service revenue in the second quarter was also impacted by the ongoing consumer shift from minutes to messaging, which was offset by growth in data revenue. Data revenue in the second quarter of 2009 was 22% of net service revenue, up from 18% in the second quarter of 2008.
Adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter of 2009 was $43.9 million compared to $32.3 million in the second quarter of 2008, up 36%. Adjusted EBITDA excluding transition and restructuring expenses in the second quarter of 2009 was $45.0 million, an increase of 35% compared to Adjusted EBITDA excluding transition and restructuring expenses of $33.4 million in the second quarter of 2008. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 15.1% in the second quarter of 2009, up from 11.0% in the second quarter of 2008. Adjusted EBITDA margin excluding transition and restructuring expenses was 15.5% in the second quarter of 2009, up from 11.4% in the second quarter of 2008.
Adjusted EBITDA in the first half of 2009 was $93.4 million compared to $61.0 million in the first half of 2008, up 53%. Adjusted EBITDA excluding transition and restructuring expenses was $97.6 million, up 57% compared to $62.1 million in the first half of 2008. Adjusted EBITDA margin excluding transition and restructuring expenses was 16.0% in the first half of 2009, up from 10.3% in the second quarter of 2008. Virgin Mobile USA's strong profitability and margin improvements in the second quarter and first half of 2009 benefited from the Company's goal of focusing on high-quality customer additions, which provide fewer but significantly more profitable gross customer additions. Adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter and first half of 2009 also benefited from cost-cutting initiatives implemented in the second half of 2008 and lower per unit network costs. The Company's new plans launched during the second quarter are performing well, with 21% of all gross customer additions adopting the $49.99 unlimited voice plan in May and June, compared with 3% average adoption of the previously available unlimited plan.
Virgin Mobile USA's net income in the second quarter of 2009 was $21.8 million, up 296% from net income of $5.5 million in the second quarter of 2008. Net income in the first half of 2009 was $40.9 million, up 299% compared with $10.3 million in the first half of 2008. Adjusted earnings per diluted share excluding amortization of intangible assets and transition and restructuring expenses were $0.27 in the second quarter of 2009 compared to $0.08 in the second quarter of 2008. Earnings per diluted share in the second quarter of 2009 benefited from planned cost efficiencies in the business, including improved per unit network costs. Virgin Mobile USA's profitability in the first half of 2009 also benefited from a 38% reduction in net interest expense when compared with the first half of 2008, which was partly the result of repayments to outstanding debt related to the acquisition of Helio.
Free cash flow totaled $29.0 million in the first half of 2009, compared to $29.2 million in the first half of 2008. The Company continues to experience positive Free cash flow due to ongoing cost efficiencies implemented in the business, and expects to grow full year Free cash flow in the range of 75% to 114% year over year. Capital expenditures in the first half of 2009 were $7.6 million compared to $9.4 million in the first half of 2008.
In 2008, Virgin Mobile USA acquired Helio and, in conjunction with the acquisition, made changes to its capital structure, including a significant reduction in the Company's outstanding debt, which the Company believes improved its structure and outlook. Net interest expense in the second quarter of 2009 was $5.1 million, down 35% from $7.9 million in the second quarter of 2008. For the first half of 2009, net interest expense was $10.7 million, down 38% from $17.3 million in the first half of 2008. Net debt has decreased from $255 million as of December 31, 2008 to $230 million as of June 30, 2009(1).
John Feehan, Chief Financial Officer of Virgin Mobile USA, commented, "We are executing well against our 2009 strategy to grow Adjusted EBITDA, Free cash flow, and high quality hybrid customers. I am particularly pleased with the strong culture of cost discipline we have instilled throughout the organization, which contributed to the 53% growth in Adjusted EBITDA in the first six months of 2009."
(1) Net debt is equal to total debt (including related party debt) minus cash
Key Metric Performance Review for the Second Quarter of 2009
Gross customer additions (or new Virgin Mobile USA customers who activated their accounts) during the second quarter of 2009 totaled 535,558, compared to gross customer additions of 728,370 in the second quarter of 2008. The year over year decline in gross customer additions was a result of intensified competition and the Company's strategic focus on high lifetime value customer acquisition. During the second quarter, Virgin Mobile USA reduced the volume of lower priced handsets in its sales channels, which resulted in fewer, but higher value, gross customer additions. Gross customer additions of hybrid plans in the first half of 2009 grew 20% compared to the first half of 2008.
Virgin Mobile USA's cost per gross addition (CPGA) for the second quarter of 2009 was $113.65, compared to CPGA of $113.38 in the second quarter of 2008. CPGA for the first half of 2009 was $108.82 compared to $114.53 in the first half of 2008. CPGA in the first half of 2009 reflects cost efficiencies in sales and marketing, as well as continued handset cost improvements.
The Company's cash cost per user (CCPU) for the second quarter of 2009 was $12.12, compared to $11.87 in the second quarter of 2008. CCPU in the first half of 2009 was $12.46 compared to $12.05 in the first half of 2008. CCPU in the second quarter of 2009 was higher due to the continued growth of our hybrid plans as well as an increase in usage associated with Helio. CCPU in the second quarter and first half of 2009 included approximately $1.2 million and $4.2 million, respectively, in transition and restructuring expenses, an increase from $1.1 million in the second quarter and first half of 2008.
Churn, or average monthly customer turnover, for the three months ended June 30, 2009 was 5.3%, a 30 basis point improvement over the same period in 2008. Customer churn is seasonally highest in the second quarter as the Company begins to experience turnover from the fourth quarter holiday selling season, which has traditionally been Virgin Mobile USA's strongest quarter for gross adds. As of June 30, 2009, Virgin Mobile USA had approximately 5.0 million customers.
Average revenue per user (ARPU) for the second quarter of 2009 was $18.98, down 3% from ARPU of $19.49 in the second quarter of 2008, and a decrease of 5% from $20.08 in the first quarter of 2009. ARPU for the first half of 2009 was $19.54 compared to $19.82 for the first half of 2008, down 1%. The decline in ARPU was a result of accelerated migrations of our $79.99 unlimited customers to our new $49.99 unlimited offer, launched during the quarter. While these immediate price downs have a near-term impact to ARPU as customers migrate, Virgin Mobile USA expects this to be more than offset by broader adoption of these high ARPU plans going forward. The $49.99 unlimited offer represented 21% of gross customer additions in May and June, and these customers have an initial ARPU of approximately $56. ARPU in the second quarter was also affected by the ongoing wireless industry trend of the replacement of voice minutes with messaging. The average monthly messaging rate at Virgin Mobile USA grew by 4% in the second quarter of 2009 over the first quarter of 2009. In the second quarter of 2009, data was 22% of total net service revenue, compared to 18% in the second quarter of 2008. Early in the second quarter, Virgin Mobile USA launched its innovative new "Texter's Delight" plans, one of which offers unlimited texting for $19.99 with 10-cent voice minutes. The adoption of these plans is trending well and these customers are showing significantly higher ARPUs and margins than our traditional pay-as-you-go customers.
Full Year 2009
Virgin Mobile USA's strategic focus on high-quality customer growth, along with its strong cost discipline, have led to a strong financial performance thus far in 2009. The Company remains confident in its guidance for both Adjusted EBITDA and Free cash flow for the full year 2009.
-- Launched our first product extension in Broadband2Go, the first
prepaid nationwide broadband device being offered exclusively at Best Buy
Mobile.
-- Announced the Company's first annual rock festival being offered with
a twist - tickets will be free. The event, "Virgin Mobile FreeFest," will
take place on August 30, 2009 and feature Blink 182, Weezer and Franz
Ferdinand, among other acts. An extensive "Free I.P." program has also
been established, providing the now "free'd out" tickets to people who
register and volunteer at a homeless youth shelter.
-- Introduced a new Samsung handset, the Mantra.
-- Debuted Opera Mini and Connect, two new features on no-annual-contract
phones that were previously only available on contract handsets. Opera Mini
provides a rich mobile Internet experience; Connect allows customers to add
and log-in their social networking sites to see all updates on a dashboard.
Both of these are designed to improve the overall customer experience.
-- Launched "Totally Unlimited Calling for $49.99" and our innovative new
"Texter's Delight" plans, offering unlimited texts with 10-cent voice
minutes for $19.99.
-- Introduced the only unemployment plan in the wireless industry, with
"Pink Slip Protection" offering three months of free service to our
eligible customers who lose their jobs while using our services, subject to
certain conditions.
-- Improved contract plans for families, adding $175/month All-In plan
with 4,000 shared anytime minutes that include unlimited messaging and data
services; a $50 A La Carte plan that includes 600 shared anytime minutes
with unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling; and an additional 200 shared
anytime minutes added to the current $100/month A La Carte plan.
-- Launched Google Maps on select prepaid phones.
Earnings Conference Call
Virgin Mobile USA will host a conference call Monday, August 10, 2009 at 8:00 A.M. (EDT) with access available via Internet and telephone. Investors and analysts may participate in the live conference call by dialing 1-888-354-3598 (toll-free domestic) or 1-706-643-8861 (international); passcode: 19184676. Please register at least 10 minutes before the conference call begins. A replay of the call will be available for one week via telephone starting approximately two hours after the call ends. The replay can be accessed at 1-800-642-1687 (toll-free domestic) or 1-706-645-9291 (international); passcode: 19184676. The webcast will be archived on Virgin Mobile USA's web site after the call at http://investorrelations.virginmobileusa.com/.
About Virgin Mobile USA, Inc.
Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. (NYSE: VM), through its operating company Virgin Mobile USA, L.P., offers millions of customers control, flexibility and choice through Virgin Mobile's Plans Without Annual Contracts, with coverage powered by the Nationwide Sprint PCS Network.
Virgin Mobile USA is known for its award-winning customer service, with more than 90% of its customers reporting satisfaction. Virgin Mobile USA service recently announced its Pink Slip Protection program, which provides eligible monthly plan customers who lose their jobs and become eligible for state unemployment benefits free service for up to three months*. Its full slate of smart, stylish and affordable handsets are available at approximately 40,000 top retailers nationwide and online at http://www.virginmobileusa.com/, with Top-Up cards available at almost 150,000 locations. Virgin Mobile USA also offers unlimited all-in contract plans with advanced devices like the Ocean 2.
*Subject to certain terms and conditions
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements and information relating to us that are based on the beliefs of our management as well as assumptions made by, and information currently available to, us. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements about our strategies, plans, objectives, expectations, intentions, expenditures, and assumptions and other statements contained in this document that are not historical facts. When used in this press release, words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "plan" and "project" and similar expressions, as they relate to us are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements reflect our current views with respect to future events, are not guarantees of future performance, and involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict. Further, certain forward-looking statements are based upon assumptions as to future events that may not prove to be accurate. Many factors could cause our actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from the results predicted include, among others, those risks and uncertainties discussed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, copies of which are available on our investor relations website at http://investorrelations.virginmobileusa.com/ and on the SEC website at http://www.sec.gov/. We neither intend nor assume any obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.
Virgin Mobile USA, Inc.
(In thousands, except share and per share amounts)
June 30, December 31,
2009 2008
------------- -------------
Cash and cash equivalents $ 26,875 $ 12,030
Accounts receivable, less allowances of
$3,987 at June 30, 2009 and $6,345 at
December 31, 2008 47,351 64,737
Due from related parties 72 132
Other receivables 11,115 12,993
Inventories 90,539 132,410
Prepaid expenses and other current assets 31,971 21,563
Total current assets 207,923 243,865
Property and equipment 194,159 183,058
Accumulated depreciation and amortization (148,325) (133,888)
Property and equipment - net 45,834 49,170
Acquired intangible assets - net 44,931 49,903
Goodwill 11,319 11,487
Other assets 10,680 12,643
Total assets $ 320,687 $ 367,068
============= =============
Accounts payable $ 64,155 $ 96,365
Due to related parties 37,252 55,838
Accrued expenses and other current
liabilities 79,806 112,842
Deferred revenue 124,459 136,367
Current portion of long-term debt, including
capital lease obligation 28,695 26,395
Total current liabilities 334,367 427,807
Long-term debt, including capital lease
obligation 159,399 170,779
Related party debt 69,000 70,000
Due to related parties 14,221 -
Other liabilities 364 2,365
Total liabilities 577,351 670,951
Series A convertible preferred stock, par
value $0.01 and stated value $1,000
per share - 50,000 shares authorized issued
and outstanding at December 31, 2008 - 50,000
Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. stockholders' equity:
per share - 51,500 shares authorized,
issued and outstanding at June 30, 2009 1 -
Class A common stock, par value $0.01 per
share - 200,000,000 shares authorized,
and 67,081,840 shares issued and outstanding,
net of 39,161 treasury shares at June 30, 2009,
and 64,709,646 shares issued and
outstanding, net of 37,560 treasury shares
at December 31, 2008 671 647
Class C common stock, par value $0.01 per
share - 999,999 shares
authorized, and 115,062 shares issued and
outstanding at June 30, 2009 and
December 31, 2008 1 1
Class B common stock, par value $0.01 per
share - 2 shares authorized, and 1 share
issued and outstanding at June 30, 2009
and 1 share authorized, issued and
outstanding at December 31, 2008 - -
Additional paid-in-capital 448,397 390,637
Accumulated deficit (716,230) (746,915)
Total Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. stockholders'
deficit (267,160) (355,630)
Noncontrolling interest 10,496 1,747
Total equity (256,664) (353,883)
Total liabilities and equity $ 320,687 $ 367,068
Consolidated Statements of Operations and Comprehensive Income
(In thousands, except per share amounts)
Operating revenue
Net service revenue $ 289,965 $ 293,824 $ 608,064 $ 600,814
Net equipment and other
revenue 17,600 26,040 36,789 49,067
Total operating revenue 307,565 319,864 644,853 649,881
Cost of service (exclusive
of depreciation
and amortization) 91,485 84,867 187,075 171,585
Cost of equipment 77,718 99,755 157,109 204,773
Selling, general and
administrative (exclusive
of depreciation and
amortization) 97,217 106,417 212,267 219,417
Restructuring 730 - 1,481 -
Depreciation and amortization 9,525 8,844 19,823 17,522
Total operating expenses 276,675 299,883 577,755 613,297
Other expense (income)
Interest expense 5,123 7,952 10,713 17,342
Interest income (3) (19) (6) (70)
Total interest expense - net 5,120 7,933 10,707 17,272
Other expense 3,592 6,110 14,224 8,190
Total other expense - net 8,712 14,043 24,931 25,462
Income before income tax
expense 22,178 5,938 42,167 11,122
Income tax expense 353 432 1,282 867
Net income attributable to the
noncontrolling interest 4,609 1,960 10,200 1,960
Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. 17,216 3,546 30,685 8,295
Preferred stock dividends 368 - 467 -
Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. common
stockholders $ 16,848 $ 3,546 $ 30,218 $ 8,295
========= ========= ========= =========
Net income $ 21,825 $ 5,506 $ 40,885 $ 10,255
Other comprehensive loss:
Loss on interest rate swap - 1,729 - (534)
Comprehensive income 21,825 7,235 40,885 9,721
attributable to the
Total Comprehensive income
attributable to Virgin Mobile
USA, Inc. $ 17,216 $ 5,275 $ 30,685 $ 7,761
Basic and diluted earnings per
share information:
stockholders - basic $ 0.26 $ 0.07 $ 0.47 $ 0.16
stockholders - diluted $ 0.23 $ 0.07 $ 0.42 $ 0.16
Weighted average common shares
outstanding - basic 65,142 52,787 64,830 52,772
outstanding - diluted 74,642 52,787 72,650 52,841
Six months ended
2009 2008
-------- --------
Operating Activities
Net income $ 40,885 $ 10,255
Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash
provided by operating activities:
Depreciation and amortization 19,823 17,522
Amortization of deferred financing costs 420 588
Non-cash charges for stock-based compensation 6,320 6,761
Provision for uncollectible accounts receivable 32 -
Write-offs of property and equipment 157 230
Accounts receivable 17,354 12,113
Due from related parties 60 (1,904)
Other receivables 1,878 7,755
Inventories 41,871 8,624
Prepaid expenses and other assets (8,697) (3,144)
Accounts payable (32,210) (25,993)
Due to related parties (4,365) 17,913
Deferred revenue (11,908) (3,032)
Accrued expenses and other liabilities (35,019) (9,115)
Net cash provided by operating activities 36,601 38,573
Investing Activities
Capital expenditures (7,572) (9,364)
Net cash used in investing activities (7,572) (9,364)
Repayment of long-term debt (13,198) (16,334)
Net repayment of related party debt (1,000) (5,000)
Net change in book cash overdraft - (2,045)
Other 14 (290)
Net cash used in financing activities (14,184) (23,669)
Net increase in cash and cash equivalents 14,845 5,540
Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of year 12,030 19
Cash and cash equivalents at end of period $ 26,875 $ 5,559
======== ========
Definition of Terms and Reconciliation to Non-GAAP Financial Measures
This earnings press release includes several historical key performance metrics used in the wireless communications industry to manage and assess our financial performance. These metrics include gross additions, churn, net customer additions, end-of-period customers, Adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted EBITDA margin, Average Revenue Per User, or ARPU, Cash Cost Per User, or CCPU, Cost Per Gross Addition, or CPGA, Free cash flow, Adjusted EBITDA excluding transition and restructuring expenses, Adjusted EBITDA margin excluding transition and restructuring expenses, Adjusted earnings (loss) per share excluding the amortization of intangibles, and Adjusted earnings (loss) per share excluding the amortization of intangibles, and transition and restructuring expenses. Trends in key performance metrics such as ARPU, CCPU and CPGA will depend upon the scale of our business as well as the dynamics in the marketplace and our success in implementing our strategies. These metrics are not calculated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States, or GAAP. A non-GAAP financial metric is defined as a numerical measure of a company's financial performance that (1) excludes amounts, or is subject to adjustments that have the effect of excluding amounts, that are included in the comparable measure calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP in the statement of operations or statement of cash flows; or (2) includes amounts, or is subject to adjustments that have the effect of including amounts, that are excluded from the comparable measure so calculated and presented. We believe that the non-GAAP financial metrics that we use are helpful in understanding our operating performance from period to period and, although not every company in the wireless communications industry defines these metrics in precisely the same way, we believe that these metrics as we use them facilitate comparisons with other wireless communications providers. These metrics should not be considered substitutes for any performance metric determined in accordance with GAAP.
Gross additions represents the number of new prepaid customers who activated an account during a period, the number of new or existing postpaid customers who entered into a new long-term contract (rather than an extension of an existing contract) and, effective this quarter, the number of new Broadband2Go customers who activated a broadband device, unadjusted for churn during the same period. Note that new Broadband2Go customers are included in gross additions regardless of whether or not they were also counted, concurrently or previously, as a gross addition to one of our voice offers. In measuring gross additions, we exclude returns, customers who have reactivated and fraudulent activations. Returns include "remorse returns" for our postpaid offers, within 30 days of activation, retailer returns for our prepaid offers, with the timing dependent on the retailer's policy, and retailer returns for our Broadband2Go device, with the timing dependent on the retailer's policy. These adjustments are applied in order to arrive at a more meaningful measure of our customer growth.
Churn is used to measure customer turnover on an average monthly basis. Churn is calculated as the ratio of the net number of customers who disconnect from our service during the period being measured to the weighted average number of customers during that period, divided by the number of months during the period being measured. The net number of customers who disconnect from our service is calculated as the total number of customers who disconnect less the adjustments noted under gross additions above. These adjustments are applied in order to arrive at a more meaningful measure of churn. The weighted average number of customers is the sum of the average number of customers for each day during the period being measured, divided by the number of days in the period. For our prepaid offers, churn includes those pay-by-the-minute customers who we automatically disconnect from our service when they have not replenished, or "Topped-Up," their accounts for 150 days, as well as those monthly customers who we automatically disconnect when they have not paid their monthly recurring charge for 150 days (except for such monthly customers who are engaged in a retention program or who replenish their account for less than the amount of their monthly recurring charge and, according to the terms of our monthly plans, may continue to use our services on a pay-by-the-minute basis), and such customers who voluntarily disconnect from our service prior to reaching 150 days since replenishing their account or paying their monthly recurring charge. We utilize 150 days in our calculation because it represents the last date upon which a customer who replenishes his or her account is still permitted to retain the same phone number. We also have a "service preserver" option which allows customers to extend the 150-day period to one year by replenishing their account using an annual top-up. In this case, we will automatically disconnect their service if an additional top-up is not made within 415 days of the qualifying annual top-up. For our postpaid offers, churn includes those customers who either disconnect from our service voluntarily or whose service we disconnect for nonpayment. These calculations are consistent with the terms and conditions of our service offering. Going forward, churn will also include those Broadband2Go customers who have not purchased a new data pack within the previous 12 months, less the adjustments noted under gross additions above. We believe churn is a useful metric to track changes in customer retention over time and to help evaluate how changes in our business and services offerings affect customer retention. In addition, churn is also useful for comparing our customer turnover to that of other wireless communications providers.
Net customer additions and end-of-period customers are used to measure the growth of our business, to forecast our future financial performance and to gauge the marketplace acceptance of our offerings. Net customer additions represents the number of new prepaid customers who activated an account during a period, the number of new or existing postpaid customers who entered into a new long-term contract (rather than an extension of an existing contract) and the number of Broadband2Go customers who activated a broadband device, adjusted for churn during the same period. End-of-period customers are the total number of customers at the end of a given period.
Adjusted EBITDA is calculated as net income (loss) plus interest expense-net, income tax expense, tax receivable agreements expense, depreciation and amortization (including the amortization of intangibles associated with our acquisition of Helio), write-offs of property and equipment, non-cash compensation expense, equity issued to a member, debt extinguishment costs and expenses of Bluebottle USA Investments L.P. prior to the completion of the IPO. Effective this year, it is no longer necessary to exclude non-controlling interest, or minority interest, given that it is excluded in the redefinition of net income, included in Statement of Financial Standards No. 160, Noncontrolling Interests in Consolidated Financial Statements. This redefinition has been applied retrospectively for presentation purposes. Although the items excluded from Adjusted EBITDA are all necessary elements of our cost structure, they are customary adjustments in the calculation of supplemental metrics. We believe Adjusted EBITDA is a useful tool in evaluating performance because it eliminates items which do not relate to our core operating performance. Adjustments relating to interest expense, income tax expense, depreciation and amortization and write-offs of fixed assets are each customary adjustments in the calculation of supplemental measures of performance. We also exclude tax receivable agreement-related expenses for payments to the Virgin Group for the utilization of net operating loss carryforwards, and to Sprint Nextel, for the increase in tax basis that will be allocated to us, as we consider them to be the functional equivalent of paying taxes. We believe that the exclusion of non-cash compensation expense provides investors with a more meaningful indication of our performance as these non-cash charges relate to the equity portion of our capital structure and not our core operating performance. The expenses of Bluebottle USA Investments L.P. also do not relate to our core operating performance and are, therefore, excluded. We believe that the exclusion of equity issued to a member and debt extinguishment costs is appropriate because these charges relate to the debt and equity portions of our capital structure and are not expected to be incurred in future periods. We believe such adjustments are meaningful because they arrive at an indicator of our core operating performance which our management uses to evaluate our business. Specifically, our management uses Adjusted EBITDA in their calculation of compensation targets, preparation of budgets and evaluation of performance.
We believe that analysts and investors use Adjusted EBITDA as a supplemental measure to evaluate our company's overall operating performance and that this metric facilitates comparisons with other wireless communications companies. However, Adjusted EBITDA has material limitations as an analytical tool and should not be considered in isolation, as an alternative to net income, operating income or any other measures derived in accordance with GAAP, or as a substitute for analysis of our results as reported under GAAP. The items we eliminate in calculating Adjusted EBITDA are significant to our business: (1) interest expense-net is a necessary element of our costs and ability to generate revenue because we incur interest expense related to any outstanding indebtedness, (2) to the extent that we incur income taxes, they represent a necessary element of our costs and our ability to generate revenue because ongoing revenue generation is expected to result in future income tax expense, (3) depreciation and amortization are necessary elements of our costs, (4) write-offs of property and equipment eliminate non-productive assets from our balance sheet, reconciling it to our earnings, (5) tax receivable agreements expenses are the costs related to our tax receivable agreements, as they are reimbursements to the Virgin Group, for the utilization of net operating loss carryforwards we received as part of the IPO, and to Sprint Nextel, for the increase in tax basis that will be allocated to us, (6) non-cash compensation expense is expected to be a recurring component of our costs which may allow us to incur lower cash compensation costs to the extent that we grant non-cash compensation, (7) expense resulting from equity issued to a member represents an actual cost relating to a prior contractual obligation, and (8) expenses associated with Bluebottle USA Investments L.P. prior to the IPO is a non-recurring component of our cost. Furthermore, any measure that eliminates components of our capital structure and the carrying costs associated with the property and equipment on our balance sheet has material limitations as a performance measure. Because Adjusted EBITDA is not calculated in the same manner by all companies, it may not be comparable to other similarly titled measures used by other companies.
Adjusted EBITDA margin is used to measure our Adjusted EBITDA performance relative to our net service revenue so that we can gauge the performance of Adjusted EBITDA normalized for the changing scale of our business. Adjusted EBITDA margin is calculated by dividing Adjusted EBITDA by our net service revenue.
The following table illustrates the calculation of Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EBITDA margin and reconciles Adjusted EBITDA to net income which we consider to be the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure.
Three Months Ended Six Months Ended
June 30, June 30,
------------------ ------------------
2009 2008 2009 2008
-------- -------- -------- --------
(In thousands, except percentages) (Unaudited) (Unaudited)
Net income $ 21,825 $ 5,506 $ 40,885 $ 10,255
Depreciation and amortization 9,525 8,844 19,823 17,522
Interest expense - net 5,120 7,933 10,707 17,272
Income tax expense 353 432 1,282 867
Tax receivable agreements expense 3,595 6,036 14,221 8,116
Non-cash compensation expense 3,277 3,340 6,320 6,761
Write-offs of property and
equipment 157 230 157 230
Adjusted EBITDA $ 43,852 $ 32,321 $ 93,395 $ 61,023
Restructuring expense (excluding
non-cash items) 668 - 1,419 -
Helio transition expense 502 - 2,779 -
IBM transition expense - 1,051 - 1,051
expenses $ 45,022 $ 33,372 $ 97,593 $ 62,074
======== ======== ======== ========
Adjusted EBITDA margin
Net service revenue 289,965 293,824 608,064 600,814
Adjusted EBITDA margin 15.1% 11.0% 15.4% 10.2%
Adjusted EBITDA margin, excluding
expenses 15.5% 11.4% 16.0% 10.3%
ARPU is used to measure and track the average revenue generated by our customers on a monthly basis. ARPU is calculated as net service revenue for the period being measured divided by the weighted average number of customers for that period, further divided by the number of months in that period. The weighted average number of customers is the sum of the average customers for each day during the period being measured divided by the number of days in that period. ARPU helps us to evaluate customer performance based on customer revenue and to forecast our future service revenues.
The following table illustrates the calculation of ARPU and reconciles ARPU to net service revenue which we consider to be the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure.
------------------- -------------------
(In thousands, except number of --------- --------- --------- ---------
months and ARPU) (Unaudited) (Unaudited)
Net service revenue $ 289,965 $ 293,824 $ 608,064 $ 600,814
Divided by weighted average number
of customers 5,093 5,026 5,186 5,053
Divided by number of months in the
period 3 3 6 6
--------- --------- --------- ---------
ARPU $ 18.98 $ 19.49 $ 19.54 $ 19.82
========= ========= ========= =========
CCPU is used to measure and track our costs to provide support for our services to our existing customers on an average monthly basis. The costs included in this calculation are our (1) cost of service (exclusive of depreciation and amortization), excluding cost of service associated with initial customer acquisition, (2) general and administrative expenses, excluding Bluebottle USA Investments L.P. general and administrative expenses prior to the IPO, non-cash compensation expense and write-offs of property and equipment, (3) restructuring expense, (4) net loss on equipment sold to existing customers, (5) cooperative advertising in support of existing customers and (6) other expense (income), excluding tax receivable agreements expenses, debt extinguishment costs and Bluebottle USA Investments L.P., prior to the IPO. These costs are divided by our weighted average number of customers for the period being measured, further divided by the number of months in the period being measured. CCPU helps us to assess our ongoing business operations on a per customer basis, and evaluate how changes in our business operations affect the support costs per customer. Given its use throughout the industry, CCPU also serves as a standard by which we compare our performance against that of other wireless communications companies.
The following table illustrates the calculation of CCPU and reconciles total costs used in the CCPU calculation to cost of service, which we consider to be the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure.
(in thousands, except number --------- --------- --------- ---------
of months and CCPU) (Unaudited) (Unaudited)
Cost of service (exclusive of
depreciation and
amortization) $ 91,485 $ 84,867 $ 187,075 $ 171,585
Less: Cost of service
associated with initial
customer acquisition (209) (461) (506) (961)
Add: General and
administrative expenses 80,326 80,143 173,643 164,656
Add: Restructuring expense 730 - 1,481 -
Less: Non-cash compensation
expense (3,277) (3,340) (6,320) (6,761)
Less: Write-offs of property
and equipment (157) (230) (157) (230)
Add: Net loss on equipment
sold to existing customers 15,947 18,778 31,821 37,139
Add: Cooperative advertising
expenses in support of
existing customers 355 (867) 742 (260)
Add: Other expense, net of
tax receivable agreements
expense (3) 74 3 74
Total CCPU costs $ 185,197 $ 178,964 $ 387,782 $ 365,242
Divided by weighted average
number of customers 5,093 5,026 5,186 5,053
Divided by number of months in
the period 3 3 6 6
CCPU $ 12.12 $ 11.87 $ 12.46 $ 12.05
CPGA is used to measure the cost of acquiring a new customer. The costs included in this calculation are our (1) selling expenses less cooperative advertising in support of existing customers, (2) net loss on equipment sales (cost of equipment less net equipment revenue), excluding the net loss on equipment sold to existing customers, write-offs of property and equipment and equity previously issued to a member of Virgin Mobile USA, LLC, and (3) cost of service associated with initial customer acquisition. These costs are divided by gross additions for the period being measured. CPGA helps us to assess the efficiency of our customer acquisition methods and evaluate our sales and distribution strategies. CPGA also allows us to compare our average acquisition costs to those of other wireless communications providers.
The following table illustrates the calculation of CPGA and reconciles the total costs used in the CPGA calculation to selling expense, which we consider to be the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure.
(In thousands, except CPGA) (Unaudited) (Unaudited)
Selling expenses $ 16,891 $ 26,274 $ 38,624 $ 54,761
Add: Cost of equipment 77,718 99,755 157,109 204,773
Less: Net equipment revenue
and other revenue (17,600) (26,040) (36,789) (49,067)
Less: Net loss on equipment
sold to existing customers (15,947) (18,778) (31,821) (37,139)
Less: Cooperative advertising
in support of existing
customers (355) 867 (742) 260
Add: Cost of service
customer acquisition 209 461 506 961
Total CPGA costs $ 60,916 $ 82,539 $ 126,887 $ 174,549
Divided by gross additions 536 728 1,166 1,524
Free cash flow, a non-GAAP measure, is calculated as net cash provided by operating activities less capital expenditures. Free cash flow is an indicator of cash generated by our business after operating expenses, capital expenditures and interest expense. We believe this measure helps to (1) evaluate our ability to satisfy our debt and meet other mandatory payment obligations, (2) measure our ability to pursue growth opportunities, and (3) determine the amount of cash which may potentially be available to stockholders in the form of stock repurchase and/or dividends subject to the terms and conditions of our Senior Credit Agreement. Given that our business is not capital intensive, we believe this measure to be of particular relevance and utility. We also use Free cash flow internally for a variety of purposes, including managing our projected cash needs.
The following table illustrates the calculation of Free cash flow and reconciles it to cash provided by operating activities, which we consider to be the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure.
(in thousands) (Unaudited)
Net cash provided by operating activities $ 36,601 $ 38,573
Less: Capital expenditures (7,572) (9,364)
Free cash flow $ 29,029 $ 29,209
Adjusted earnings per share. The Company is presenting adjusted earnings per share which excludes the amortization of intangibles associated with the acquisition of Helio which occurred on August 22, 2008 as well as transition and restructuring expenses associated with the acquisition of Helio, the outsourcing of IT services to IBM and the workforce reduction taken in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Three Months Six Months
Ended June 30, Ended June 30,
--------------- ---------------
Diluted earnings per share available to 2009 2008 2009 2008
Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. common ------- ------- ------- -------
stockholders: (Unaudited) (Unaudited)
Net income per share - diluted $ 0.23 $ 0.07 $ 0.42 $ 0.16
Amortization of intangibles per share(1) 0.03 - 0.06 -
------- ------- ------- -------
Adjusted earnings per share 0.26 0.07 0.48 0.16
Transition and restructuring expenses(1) 0.01 0.01 0.03 0.01
Adjusted earnings per share - diluted,
excluding amortization of intangibles,
and transition and restructuring expenses $ 0.27 $ 0.08 $ 0.51 $ 0.17
======= ======= ======= =======
(1) Adjustment amounts are presented net of taxes and minority interest
Web site: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/
Jayne Wallace
Erica Bolton
SOURCE: Virgin Mobile USA
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Establishment of a Unit of Excellence within the Water Authority of Jordan Planning & Management Unit (PMU)
The Water Authority of Jordan (WAJ) wanted to establish a Unit of Excellence to ensure the achievement of a sustainable future for the country’s water sector. In particular, the WAJ wanted to improve the overall quality and reliability of water and wastewater services. It also wanted to deploy Public Private Partnership (PPP) structures to encourage investment in the sector. To achieve these objectives, IPA assisted WAJ in developing capacity to design, structure and implement such projects, as well as to enhance overall monitoring of water standards and services in Jordan.
IPA supported WAJ in developing tools which would enable it to efficiently and effectively manage the water sector in a manner consistent with its objectives. This included the development of tools and procedures which would enable WAJ to capture and document all information about the sector, to make that information available to the general public and, thereby, to help improve the water sector. IPA also committed to a long-term engagement to provide consistent training to develop and enhance WAJ’s staff’s capabilities.
In delivering these requirements, IPA:
Developed a case study for the implementation of the As-Samra Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) as a BOT project;
Created high-level PPP Projects preparation guidelines, including:
Procurement procedures templates;
Risk management and allocation; and
Handbook and a process workflow for PPP projects.
Developed the high level structure for a PPP financial model; and
Provided ongoing training to PMU staff on rationale behind and implementation of the PPP guidelines.
Our ultimate aim was to support the PMU to build sufficient and sustainable technical capacity in order to help it achieve its objectives.
Project Evaluation
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I was just thinking about how I do nothing but wait all of the time, however that thought led me to thinking of something,. At my cousin Voncile's funeral the minster gave a wonderful sermon on waiting and it is something I must always remember. Wait means to be of service. When you are waiting, you are to be of service. God that is a wonderful revelation.
UNCF Tribute to Aretha
Fantasia rocked the fuck out of Rock Steady at the UNCF tribute to Aretha Franklin. Chaka was powerful with RESPECT!
This is a Great Interview with the Poet Ai
It felt very inclusive, I think, for a lot of people.
Yeah. And for Native Americans and Indians -- well, we just call ourselves Indians here; I'm vice president of the Native American faculty, too, so I have a lot of duties now here -- so it was another win for them, too, and for Oklahoma, which is a state that's had a lot of problems, like the Oklahoma City bombing. You know, that's the thing about minority faculty that I don't know if people understand: you are not simply filling one role; you don't go to a school just as a faculty member. You have duties. Like I am standing in for Blacks, Native Americans, and Asians at my school, generally, because I'm the only minority faculty in the English Department.
Yeah. There's a man from India, but that's it.
Is that something that you choose?
What? To help? To stand in?
To be there, as opposed to someplace where you would...
Oh! Well, I was here as a visitor, just for a year, and then when I won the Book Award, they offered me tenure starting in January. So I won the Book Award in November, and they offered me a full professorship with tenure in January. And I was like, "Well, Ai, a bird in the hand, you know... this is a really good offer." So I thought, well, I'll just take it. So I sort of ... they made it so fast, I sort of didn't think about it. And I'm here doing research on my Indian family. I'm not done with my research, and they gave me a lot of money, too, so you know, it's a good deal! There are probably other places I'd like. I wouldn't mind being in Arizona, but Arizona didn't make me an offer! And I'm doin' okay. I don't know. Oklahoma certainly has its share of bigotry, which I feel I have certainly experienced. I haven't talked to the powers-that-be about it, but I certainly feel that there's some out there, and I'm not used to the kinds of encounter here, and some of it has been anti-Indian. [laughs] So I'm gettin' it from everywhere! I talked to this taxi driver about it, 'cause she's trying to find her Cherokee grandmother. She said, "Oh, they're very prejudiced towards Indians here." And I said, "Well, why?" And she said, "Well, they think they have everything." I said, "Well, they lost everything!" So there's definitely some of that in my area of Oklahoma.
The resentment?
Oh yeah, I've heard that. Well, I've certainly had some problems; let's just put it like that. Some racial, and some sexual. It's a mix, when you're minority faculty and a woman, because it's race and sex. I'm not trouble-free.
Do you feel that from the other side, too, where you get exoticized as a woman of color, and given all sorts of exotic praise or put up as window dressing?
Oh, I'm sure it happens. I don't think I'm getting that here actually, which I guess is a compliment to the place. But I have sometimes wondered about the amount of praise I was getting. Slightly. [laughs] But it always happens, when you're a minority. I don't think I've been over-praised; I write good poems. I just think of it like that. I don't question it too much.
I never think of myself as a token. Anytime people try to make me one, I just reject it. I never really capitalized on my minority status. I didn't really want to do that. There were instances when I was younger when I certainly could have done that. I'm not an enrolled tribe member now, but I'd mentioned it in a magazine somewhere, and Indian people wrote me and stuff, but it seemed like I have so many mixtures, it wasn't right of me to capitalize on my Indian blood. And that might have been skewed, you know, I might have been wrong, but it's been proved to me since I moved here that it's not too late, and it's your family, so you have a right. I have a right to go in there and say, "I have this and that Indian blood."
It's real interesting here, 'cause my experience with the family background is not uncommon here; things that happened in my family are rather common here, and that's been good for me to see. Like, for instance, some of the Indian women married with whites and didn't get on the rolls, because they didn't want to be on the rolls. They wanted to be safe, didn't want to be Indian. And you would think, like when I was in Arizona, my opinion would have been, "Oh, that's bad; they were ashamed." But since I moved to Oklahoma and I can understand the historical circumstances, I understand that, and I'm not judging people for what they did then. They were trying to survive. But it raises interesting moral questions, and in some of my research I have to get the case files, and one family said they had a Choctaw mother, so they rushed out to Mississippi when they were doing the final rolls, and they tried to get on them. And the Choctaw/Chickasaw people questioned them over and over again. They would say, "Well, how does she look?" They got real down to it. They would say, "Was her hair kinky or straight?" I mean, it was totally naked. Over and over again, they'd describe her. She sounded Indian to me, but they went as far as to forge a letter from a Chief, saying she was Indian. They did bad things, and a lot of the names were similar to my family names. [laughs] I said, "Oh, they're pretty under-handed here; hmmmm, they could be family!" Two of the sons were in the Confederate Army, okay? So that would have been something. In the end, not enough names matched up, so they weren't my family, but they were denied tribal membership. But how would I have dealt with that? Two sons in the Confederate Army, for god's sake!
So there's a lot of interesting stuff in Oklahoma. They had slaves, too, you know, the "five civilized tribes," so there's all the different roles and mixtures, and it's just fascinating. So there is a rhyme or reason for my being here. I almost feel my great-grandfather, like the ghosts are out there. There are still things being hashed over today that began back when, on the Trail of Tears, for instance. If you tap into your ancestors, if you tap into the ghosts of these ancestors, they are still doing things. They are still saying, "Granddaughter, I want you to look into this for me." That's the way I feel about my great-grandfather, sometimes. He's saying, "You know, I want you to check on this; check on these mineral rights to this land that we have." So I'm looking for a deed, 'cause they sold the land, but they kept the mineral rights. It's all kinds of stuff here; it's just totally rich.
Sounds a little like the stuff that you touched on in "Passing Through."
Yeah, although I fictionalized it, so it's a woman who's half White. But yeah, that poem was sort of opening the door to what I'm actually working on for a memoir, for my own history. But, as far as I can tell, there wasn't any rape involved in what went on with my family's mixing; they willingly went to the other side or whatever, so that's interesting, too. But I don't know all the details. I have to track everything. I don't know whether I'll ever learn everything, but I'm trying to track some things down.
One woman here is Creek, and her grandmother was at Indian school when a White man married her when she was 12, and it was to get her land, see. So it's possible that my great-great-grandmother may not have even been married to this man, but she had a child with him. But it may have been that he had another wife; that's what I'm trying to zero in on. A White wife, see. Some of them had two and three families. One of the White men I looked at, he had several Choctaw wives. [laughs] He divorced one, and they said, "Why did you divorce?" He said, "I wanna get me another one!" It was weird like that. It was weird stuff! And then the last letter in his file is from one of the Choctaw wives, and they said, "Well, we understand he's a fugitive from justice." And I said, "Oh, could be my family; it's so wild!" It was really wild, you know.
These are your people?
[laughs] These are people I was hopin' might be my relatives! No, I haven't found them. You know, I'm lookin' up family names and a lot of times you get one name that's the same, and you don't know until you send for the case file from the national archives. Then you have all the information. So one name might be a family name, but then when you look at all the other wives, sons and daughters, they don't match up, right, so it's not your family.
And this will be your first novel?
Well, memoir. I wrote that novel, but it hasn't come out. I haven't dealt with my family history at all yet, so it'll all be in the memoir. It's so fascinating and interesting, it's kind of a riveting tale. I think it will be. It'll be part history, part memoir. There's not a whole lot out there about mixed-race people in the Old West in this area, so I thought I'd touch on a lot of things.
How will it be to have yourself as your subject for the first time?
It'll be okay. I sort of am a fictionalized subject in my novel, actually. I'm a character, and so is my mother, and my grandmother, my ancestors. But I don't know what's going to happen with that, because my editor keeps telling me it's not ready, and I don't want to do a re-write, so it's just in limbo. [laughs] I sold it, but I collected half the advance.
You don't care whether it's published?
Well, yeah, but I had to sort of let it go. I was upset for a while; I was real upset. But now, it's been so long since I sold it -- I think I sold it in '94 -- but it wasn't finished. It was only half-way through, I think. In '97, when I was in Boulder, I sent what I considered to be my final draft, and then she told me it wasn't ready, and then I was mad, and I didn't do anything for two years. Then after I won the Book Award, I had interest from other publishers, see, and then I told my editor, and she said, "Well, let me read it again." Then she thought it still needs works. It's at an agency, but I haven't signed with the agency, and they thought they could piggy-back with the memoir, so they were waiting for the memoir. So anyway, I don't know I'll do. Oh well. [laughs] It has interracial sex in it, so I wonder if that might be a problem. It shouldn't, but, you know.
Not anymore, though. The interracial movement is very strong now.
Well, that's what I'm dealing with. The novel is called Black Blood, and it turns on how much Black blood these people have, in the novel. [laughs] So how did they get mixed? By having sex with somebody in another race; that's how! But I think my memoir is really gonna be good. [laughs] If she ever finishes her research! I could go on and on; I guess you could tell. [laughs] It's weird because the past is living for me. I was brought up short in Austin, because I mentioned a rancher my great-grandfather used to work for in Texas, and a woman came up after and said, "I haven't heard those names in years!" He was one of those cattle kings, right, and the day of the cattle king is over, but to me it's living. I hadn't really thought about how much in the past that is. To me it's like it was yesterday.
Is that part of what you've described as "psychohistory"?
Well, no, psychohistory is more like ascribing some kind of psychological reason for an historical event. At least, that's how I think of it. But in the end, I might actually touch on some of that in my work -- maybe by saying, "Why did a relative not get on the rolls" or whatever. So anyway, I probably deviated from your question. And you're not payin' me for this interview, either!
No, ma'am!
Well, let's wrap it up, honey; it's almost 5! [laughs] What else did you want to ask?
Just a couple of questions. What do you see as the relation between history and poetry, or between poet and historian?
Well, I guess I sort of touched on that in the last conversation, right? The Greeks used to take a poet to battle with them, so the poet would stand on a hill or something and record the battle. And I do think of that as sort of my role sometimes. You know, we are observers sometimes, rather than participants. But other times we're participants/observers. I felt that way in Austin. I almost hated to leave. I went down for this book festival which is chaired by Laura Bush, so it was fascinating to be there and to have protests going on -- the festival was at the capital. At that time, I really did feel like it was almost Grecian, in that I was a poet and I was observing, and who knows, I might write something, sometime.
That was a remarkable event.
You know, I was supposed to have an interview with her; she was interviewing four writers, and it was going to be on an NBC affiliate. And that morning, as they drove off to the ranch, I thought, "Well, I guess there'll be no interview." And I thought maybe she wanted to interview me because I was born Texas, but I did win the Book Award -- that's how I haven't quite absorbed how big a prize that was. That was a really major award, and I'm sort of a representative of poetry now, in a way that I hadn't been before.
You were. But now there's larger recognition.
Yeah, definitely. I got so much press, you know. I went to the ceremony, week before last in New York, when Lucille Clifton won, and it was nothing like the year before. The press were everywhere for that 50th anniversary. There were press at this one, but they seemed to be everywhere the year before. I imagine Oprah being there had something to do with it, too, but we got a lot more attention I think last year. Plus, the press were all involved in the election this year. So that really was the year to win, for me anyway. It was a great year to win.
What do you think about Lucille Clifton winning this year?
Oh, I think it was great for her to win. I feel like she really has given a lot to poetry.
It's the first time two women of color have won, back to back.
I know! I was thinking about that, and I was saying, "Next year, that probably won't happen." [laughs] 'Cause someone somewhere is probably fussin' about it. You know they are. Well, Lucille Clifton is well-liked in poetry, she really is. She writes good poems, and she's a really nice person. It was great to see her win; it really was. We still didn't know, when we were sitting at our little table waiting for them to announce the winner, any prize you really don't know. I guessed; right before, my friend said, "Who do you think will win?" and I said, "Lucille." But until that moment, I wasn't sure, 'cause you don't know. Some people, I guess it's obvious, and others it isn't. Sometimes, when I'm judging things, you pick your finalists, and then, if it's close, then it's really tough. You have to keep reading and reading and reading. Sometimes that's really hard; sometimes when I judge I wish I could give more than one.
What do you consider the most important relationships between teaching and writing? You know, a lot of people say writing can't be taught.
Well, you certainly can teach students what makes a good poem and what makes a bad poem, and you can teach them how to write a good poem. It can be taught. For your gifted students, that's a whole other thing. But it can be argued that the raw talent is already there. You can teach somebody how to construct a good poem; you can teach someone how to read a poem; and how to tell if what they're reading qualifies as good or bad or mediocre. So there are definitely things that can be taught. And it also teaches discipline. I feel like the discipline that you learn in being able to sit down and concentrate on one subject and craft something can be carried over into other areas of your life. And that's what I try to teach my beginning students, many of whom are not going to be writers. Our beginning writing here is a Humanities course, so we often have many students who are just taking writing as a one-time deal. I really do think some things can be taught.
Your poem "Pentecost" ends with the lines, "If you suffer from the grave/ you can kill from it." This is the only published poem you've dedicated to yourself. Why?
[laughs] Oh, yeah, well, I was younger then! I guess I was into this Zapata thing back when. I got into Mexican history and I was reading a lot, and I was remembering that movie from years ago. To me, he was a hero. See, it was more like, not the reality, but the character I created that I was into. Now this is so old I don't know that I even remember exactly what was going on at the time, in my mind. It was just a long time ago.
You've never dedicated another poem to yourself.
No, I wouldn't today, I don't think.
Out of humility, or what?
Oh, I don't know. I guess I would, if I wanted to. Maybe I thought that was the be-all and end-all for Ai at the time, but I certainly don't think there's a be-all and end-all now.
To be a revolutionary?
No, it wasn't literal at all.
Iconographically.
Maybe. I don't know what I meant. Sorry! I can't help you! It was thirty... how many years ago was that? '78? '77? There's a lot of water under that bridge. A lot of poverty-stricken summers for Ai.
Yeah! I was pretty broke, before I got this job. I was so broke, they sent a grad student to get me, [laughs] and I had to use his credit card; I had to buy stuff on his credit card. The dean lent me a thousand dollars, when I got here, so I could rent an apartment. I was totally broke.
Last year!?
Yeah! I hadn't taught since Colorado. I couldn't get a job.
No, I'm not kidding you; it was horrible.
And you went from that to winning the National Book Award.
Yeah. [laughs] But I had to sell my whole poetry collection to survive. I have hardly any books of poetry left. I would have to buy someone else's collection. I called this guy I sold them to, and I think he sold my stuff. So I have to begin again. And many of them were old, signed copies. It's really sad, but I guess it's okay.
So that's what you meant when you said that you'd worked off all your bad karma.
Yeah, I guess I have! I mean, it was horrible. I had a horrible time, beginning in Boulder, the second year. I couldn't afford the rent. I had to get out of there and go to Arizona. It's really a fuckin' nightmare. But Baby Ai can pay it now!
Isn't that strange - to go from a position of not being able to negotiate for yourself, to being able to get what you need done.
Yeah! I would say some guardian angel somewhere was lookin' down on Baby Ai.
Labels: Ai, Literature, Poetry
I'm A Little BlackBird Looking for a Bluebird--As Deciphered From The Josephine Baker Story
Josephine Baker
I'm a little blackbird looking for a bluebird oooh
even little blackbirds get a little lonesome ohhh
and blue
I've been all over from east to west
in search of someone to feather my nest
why don't I find one
the same way you do?
the answer must be
I am hoodoo...
I'm a little jazzboat looking for a rainbow through....
The look of love is in your eyes
a look your smile can't disguise
is saying so much more than just words could ever say
and what my heart has heard, well it takes my breath away
I can hardly wait to hold you, feel my arms around you
how long I have waited
waited just to love you, now that I have found you
You've got the Look of love, it's on your face
a look that time can't erase
be mine tonight
let this be
just the start of so many nights like this
let's take a lover's vow and then seal it with a kiss
I love you so
I also made the best avocado paste with lemon juice, salt, pepper, and onions. Divine
I made the best black beans and rice with kielbasa, tomatoes, and onions. I love having a slow cooker!
There was an encouraging number of people at today's anti-war rally--about fifty people. All sorts represented. The dynamics of Lafayette's progressive community are interesting. Fused in with Lafayette/Purdue dynamics, this town really does make its statements.
Everybody Says Don't
From The Broadway Album-Barbra Streisand
Everybody says don't it isn't right
Don't is isn't nice
Everybody says don't walk on the grass
Don't disturb the peace
Don't skate on the ice
Well i say do, i say,Walk on the grass it was meant to feel
I say sail till to the windmill
And if you fail you fail!
Everybody says don't Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't get out of line
When they say that then lady that's a sign
No times out of ten
Lady you are doing just fine.
Make just a ripple come on be brave
This time a ripple next time a wave
Sometimes you have to start small,
Climbing the tiniest wall
Maybe you're going to fall
But it is better than not starting at all.
Everybody says no stop
Musn't rock the boat musn't touch a thing
Everybody says wait
Everybody says can't fight city-hall
Can't upset the court
Can't laugh at the king!
Well i say try,I say,Laugh at the king or he'll make you cry
Loose your poise
Fall if you have to but lady make a noise...Yes!
Everybody says don't Everybody says can't
Everybody says wait around for miracles
That's the way the world is made
I insist on miracles if you do them,
Miracles might come true,
Then i say don't...
Don't be afraid!
you may see a stranger
you may see a stranger across a crowded room
and somehow you know
you know even then
that somehow you'll see him again and again
someone may be laughing
you may hear him laughing across a crowded room
and night after night
as strange as it seems
the sound of his laughter will sing in your dreams
who can explain it? who can tell you why?
fools give you reasons, wise men never try
some enchanted evening when you find your true love
across a crowded room then fly to his side
and make him your own
or all through your life you will dream all alone
once you have found him
never let him go
neeveeer llleeett hiiiim
goooooooo
Back to Broadway
I adore Barbra's Back to Broadway Album. I first got this album(on cassette) when it first came out in 1992. I used to play it all the time and there is such a beautiful collage of music with many beautiful and powerful messages.
Venezuela May Ask the U.S. Ambassador to Leave
Hugo Chavez has said the U.S. Ambassador has been trying to meddle in Venezuelan affairs and has told him he may ask him to leave. Haha! Viva Chavez!
It was a dark, stormy night. The air was moist and the wind that frolicked around the trees in rushed curlicues bit into one’s skin the moment one stepped outside the door. I sat in the computer lab, chatting online and piecing together a story which sat unsure in the pit of my stomach. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as he approached. He came in with someone else, another Latino man, shorter, darker man and slightly heavier. Charles was tall and lanky, and what drew my eye to him was his beautiful pointed nose. As they sat down at the computer terminals opposite mine, I couldn’t help but to stare in his direction. He wore a tan colored tshirt and jeans, obviously just coming off of work, a baseball cap atop his head. My hands began to tremble and my heart raced as I silently swooned. I knew I had to speak to him. After a few minutes had passed, I decided to strike up a conversation. I worked on my story a few more minutes, adding a few sentences here and there, calming my nerves at the same time. I worked up the nerve and looked in his direction. He was casually joking around with the man sitting next to him, who I made out to be his brother-in-law. “How’s it going?” I asked, flashing a million dollar smile. He stopped to look at me, smiling back and spoke. “It’s good! It’s all good, real good. How are you?” I loved the melody of his voice. “I’m fine. What’s your name?” “Charles,” he said, the music still flowing out of his voice. “I’m David,” I replied, intoxicated by his energy. He extended his hand and we shook, a firm grip in his handshake. “ Do you live here at the complex?” I asked. “Yea. We live over in the corner there.” I nodded my acknowledgement of his answer. He put me at great ease and made me drunk with his jubilant spirit. “So what do you do here in town?” I asked, after enjoying his aura for a while. “I work construction. I just moved up here from El Paso to work for the Kings.” “Who are the Kings?” I asked, ignorant. “The people that own this place.” “Ah,” I said. I had lived there for five years and never known who owned the place. I asked him if he liked jazz and invited him to come and listen at the piano bar that played live jazz on Thursday nights. That was the beginning of my friendship with Charles. In that moment we began a slow, erotic dance encompassing friendship, one in which I would find a most incredible lover.That Thursday I arrived at the piano bar alone, coming from studying at the library on campus. I selected a table near the front and sat down to wait and see if Charles would come. The music started and the shrill keys of the piano burst into “When Sonny Gets Blue.” It was my favorite number. I closed my eyes and started to drift along with the music when I felt someone approaching me. I opened my eyes to see Charles standing next to the table, dressed in blue jeans and a tan shirt. He looked adorable. “Hey,” I said, pulling the chair out from the table for him to sit. “Hey there! Thanks for inviting me. I dig the music already.” He sat next to me. I could feel the bristle of the hairs on his arm against my skin. The song ended and they drifted into another number. The music was especially mellow that night and the atmosphere in the bar was loose and pleasantly bacchanalian. People were swaying and the feeling of the crowd was ambrosial. Charles began making cat-calls at intervals while the trumpet played. He broke the reserve of the typically cold, conservative room and I fell in love with him. That night, after the show was over, I rode home with Charles in his red, worn with age truck. My eyes were glued to the figure of his profile in the half, dark light. A smile crept up on my face. “ You enjoyed the show?” I asked. “Ahh, I loved it!” His face lit up. “I love live music, man. And Jazz is the greatest.” “I very much agree.” I said. “Would you like to go again next week?” I asked. “Sure thing man.” He said. We drove along a little bit in silence. “Do you mind if I light up one of these?” He asked, pulling a joint out from his glove compartment. “No, not at all.” He lit it and took several puffs. “Would you like a hit?” “No thanks,” I refused, nervous at never having tried anything like it before. He dropped me off at my apartment and made his way home. The night had been beautiful and pleasant. The next week, the aura of the club was free and open, and a soft light made the oak panels that made up the walls of the place glisten. The jazz band that played that night was on fire and the assembled crowd was soon on their feet, dancing. Charles stood out from the center of them. I got into the groove of the party and began dancing too. I felt lithe and moved in tune to the saxophone that formed the heartbeat of the music that was playing out on the floor. That night, I felt I had been taken to another level and I decided that I would make my interest in Charles known to him. After the show, I invited him back to my place to listen to some jazz. We climbed the three flights of stairs to my apartment and I ushered him in, turning on my stereo while I poured some wine. A great Jazz tune started to play, and as I brought him his wine, we began dancing, pulling in close as we moved to the beat. After the number was over, I asked him what he would like to hear as I was unsure of what to play. He was unsure as well, at which I invited him to come browse my music collection to see what he liked. He walked towards the counter where my CD collection sat and I sat my glass of wine down and followed him there. As I stood behind him, I was mesmerized by his scent and a river of sensation rocked my entire body. “You are really cute.” I said, a smile taking to my face. “Thanks,” he said, filtering through my CD collection, still floating off of the high of the evening. I placed my hand on his ass and turned slightly towards him. “Hey, no don’t do that. I’m straight,” he replied. The revelation threw me for a whirl. The feeling was still high, though I felt a bit dampened by his pronouncement. Something though, made me choose to continue my advances. He selected a CD and put it on to play, then we went to sit back on the couch. As the music played, I let my hand slip into his lap. For a few minutes, we simply continued to groove to the music and I felt him loosen a bit. As I reached the inside of his thigh he stopped me. “Hey, slow down their partner. I’m sorry I’m not much game tonight, but I like women.” “I see.” I said, retreating my hand slightly from his thigh. A few minutes later, the music still playing, I began to stroke his chest. “You’re really into me aren’t you?” He asked, a grin on his face. “ I am.” I replied honestly, my hand swirling around his chest and playing with his stomach through his shirt. I turned and kissed him. His mouth was sweet and I relished the sweetness of his lips, his tongue, and his throat. With both hands I began to roam his body and soon my mouth left his and went to his ear. “Oh my god, what’s happening here?” He asked as a frenzy started to form as we kissed and explored. “ Relax,,” I said. “It’s just two people appreciating each other.” “Is that all it is?” He asked as the front of his pants came open. “That’s all,” I replied. What had begun as a beautiful night, developed into a beautiful azure evening as Charles and I sailed the heights of his masculine glory. He began to get nervous as we went along. “Are your doors locked?” He asked. I reassured him as I kissed the inside of his thigh. Charles fretted for a few more moments and then fell into the web of our lovemaking. The night was beautiful. After hours passed, we slowly arose from the couch, rearranging our clothes. Charles prepared to go home. At the door, I embraced him, and he returned the embrace. “Do you want to go to the piano bar this Thursday?” I asked. “Sure!” he replied, his joviality returned a bit. “It’s a deal then. “I smiled, wanting to kiss him. I brushed his arm slightly then he left, headed towards his apartment at the back of the complex. I headed back towards my bed in a daze, completely in love, ecstatic that the night had turned out so beautifully.
I think we should get rid of the word natural and replace it with human. Natural has been the excuse for too many things. Natural should only be affiliated with things that are supernal or ethereal.
I have such an affinity for Cuba. I don't know, perhaps there is some ancient connection there.
I have learned an appreciation for the word hallelujah.
A Charge to Keep
I was looking at my Uncle's obituary and the headingi said, " A Charge Given- A Charge Served." What beautiful words.
A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify,
A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky.
To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfill:
O may it all my powers engage
To do my Master’s will!
Arm me with jealous care,
As in Thy sight to live;
And O Thy servant, Lord, prepare
A strict account to give!
Help me to watch and pray,
And on Thyself rely,
Assured, if I my trust betray,
I shall for ever die.
Pirate Jenny
Nina Simone/Bertoldht Brecht
You people can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors
And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawking
Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell
In this crummy Southern town
In this crummy old hotel
But you'll never guess to who you're talkin'.
No. You couldn't ever guess to who you're talkin'.
Then one night there's a scream in the night
And you'll wonder who could that have been
And you see me kinda grinnin' while I'm scrubbin'
And you say, "What's she got to grin?"
I'll tell you.
There's a ship
The Black Freighter
with a skull on its masthead will be coming in
You gentlemen can say, "Hey gal, finish them floors!
Get upstairs! What's wrong with you! Earn your keep here!
You toss me your tips
and look out to the ships
But I'm counting your heads
as I'm making the beds
Cuz there's nobody gonna sleep here, honey
Nobody!
And you say, "Who's that kicking up a row?"
And ya see me kinda starin' out the winda
And you say, "What's she got to stare at now?"
I'll tell ya.
turns around in the harbor
shootin' guns from her bow
Now You gentlemen can wipe off that smile off your face
Cause every building in town is a flat one
This whole frickin' place will be down to the ground
Only this cheap hotel standing up safe and sound
And you yell, "Why do they spare that one?"
Yes.That's what you say.
"Why do they spare that one?"
All the night through, through the noise and to-do
You wonder who is that person that lives up there?
And you see me stepping out in the morning
Looking nice with a ribbon in my hair
And the ship
runs a flag up its masthead
and a cheer rings the air
By noontime the dock
is a-swarmin' with men
comin' out from the ghostly freighter
They move in the shadows
where no one can see
And they're chainin' up people
and they're bringin' em to me
askin' me,"Kill them NOW, or LATER?"
Askin' ME!"Kill them now, or later?"
Noon by the clock
and so still by the dock
You can hear a foghorn miles away
And in that quiet of death
I'll say, "Right now.Right now!"
Then they'll pile up the bodies
And I'll say,
"That'll learn ya!"
disappears out to sea
And on it is
I have just begun Brecht's Mutter Courage. It is wonderful!
Oh, The Power Structure
So, they arrest this white man for killing blacks in 1964, I suppose to offset their arrest of BLA members. Hmm.....That doesnt even work.
NYU Students Sue Over Removal of Morales/Shakur Monument
Read about the lawsuit brought forth by NYU students about the removal of a marker honoring Guillermo Morales and Assata Shakur.
I just finished The Senator and the Socialite about the first Black U.S. senator, Blanche Bruce and the dynasty he founded. Fascinating book. I am still mulling it over in my head. One thing I definitely find about the Black upperclasses is that, as the multitude of them were the products of illegitimacy and white patronage, they are/were definitely not as patriarchal as their white counterparts.
Self Reliance and Second Class citizenship be damned! I would have castrated that MF!
The Arrest of Six BLA Members
Such sad news as the police have harrassed and detained six former member of the Black Liberation Army. These people should be freed and should make their way to Cuba. God help them to overcome the wickedness of white people.
What I am Discovering
Indianapolis was a stomping ground for a lot of wealthy and well-to-do Blacks. Senator Blanche Bruce, and more so, his wife's family lived in Indianapolis during the last decades of the 19th century(Bruce only spent two years in Indianapolis). Also, Lena Horne had people living in Indianapolis. One of her uncles ran a newspaper there. Frederick Douglass was a constant visitor to Indy. There is definitely some rich history there to be discovered.
Oh My, The Connections
I had no clue that Eslanda Robeson, Paul Robeson's most wonderful and courageous spouse, was the granddaughter of Francis L. Cardozo. Cardozo was a very famous progressive educator and minister before and after the Civil War. He was a mulatto from South Carolina whose white father sent him to the University of Glasgow. He presided over Paul Lawrence Dunbar School in Washington D.C.
It is interesting there are some people who think they can define my existence. I am a Goodson, a Deramus, and a Smith, oh lord!
I Never Loved a Man(The Way that I Love You)
You're a no good heart breaker
You're a liar and you're a cheat
And I don't know why
I let you do these things to me
My friends keep telling me
That you ain't no good
But oh, they don't know
That I'd leave you if I could
I guess I'm uptight
And I'm stuck like glue
Cause I ain't never
I ain't never, I ain't never, no, no (loved a man)
(The way that I, I love you)
Some time ago I thought
You had run out of fools
But I was so wrong
You got one that you'll never lose
The way you treat me is a shame
How could ya hurt me so bad
Baby, you know that I'm the best thing
That you ever had
Kiss me once again
Don'cha never, never say that we we're through
Never, Never, no, no (loved a man)
I can't sleep at night
And I can't eat a bite
I guess I'll never be free
Since you got, your hooks, in me
Whoa, oh, ohYeah!
I ain't never loved a man
I ain't never loved a man, baby
Ain't never had a man hurt me so bad
Well this is what I'm gonna do about it
Dignity, Integrity, Respect.Humanity.
And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going
And I am telling you I'm not going.
You're the best man I'll ever know.
There's no way I can ever go.
No, no, no, no way,
No, no, no, no way I'm living without you.
I'm not living without you.
I don't want to be free.
I'm staying, I'm staying,
And you, and you, you're gonna love me.
Ooh, you're gonna love me.
And I am telling you
I'm not going,
Even though the rough times are showing.
There's just no way, there's no way!
We're part of the same place,
We're part of the same time.
We both share the same blood.
We both have the same mind.
And time and time we have so much to share.
No! No, no, no, no, no!
I'm not waking up tomorrow morning
And finding that there's nobody there.
Darling, there's no way,
No, no, no, no way
I'm living without you.
You see, there's just no way,
There's no way!
Tear down the mountains,
Yell, scream and shout.
You can say what you want,
I'm not walking out.
Stop all the rivers,Push, strike and kill.
I'm not gonna leave you,
There's no way I will!
I'm not going.
There's no way I can ever, ever go.
I'm not living without you,
And you, and you, and you,
you're gonna love me.
You're gonna love me!
I saw Dreamgirls the other night. Great film! I see Oscar written all over Jennifer Hudson!
Grave, Brutal, and Unnecessary
25 troops killed in one day. How many Iraqis now? Oh what price men will pay for their evils.
See the little brown girl
She's as old as me
She looks just like chocolate
Oh mummy cant you see
We are both in first grade
She sits next to me
I took care of her mum
When she skinned her knee
She sang a song so pretty
On the jungle jim
When jimmy tried to hurt herI punched him in the chin
Mom can she come overTo play dolls with me
We could have such fun mum
Oh mum whatd you say
Why noy oh why not
Oh I see
The other woman finds time to manicure her nails
The other woman is perfect where her rival fails
And shes never seen with pin curls in her hair
The other woman enchantes her clothes with french perfume
The other woman keeps fresh cut flowers in each room
There are never toys thats scattered everywhere
And when her baby comes to call
He'll find her waiting like a lonesome queen
Cos when shes by his sideIts such a change from old routine
But the other woman will always cry herself to sleep
The other woman will never have his love to keep
And as the years go by the other woman
Will spend her life alone
I was just thinking about how I do nothing but wai...
I'm A Little BlackBird Looking for a Bluebird--As ...
I also made the best avocado paste with lemon juic...
I made the best black beans and rice with kielbasa...
There was an encouraging number of people at today...
I think we should get rid of the word natural and ...
I have such an affinity for Cuba. I don't know, pe...
I have learned an appreciation for the word hallel...
I have just begun Brecht's Mutter Courage. It is w...
NYU Students Sue Over Removal of Morales/Shakur Mo...
I just finished The Senator and the Socialite abo...
It is interesting there are some people who think ...
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Have You Heard of the National Defense Authorization Act?
This is worse than the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act.Passed by the U.S. Senate, but thankfully facing a veto from President Obama, this bill truly would erode every right of every citizen in the United States. Read here .
Black Like Jesus: A Photo-Interview with Thomas Sayers Ellis
Thomas Sayers Ellis is one of the premier African American poets in the United States today as well as a distinguished college professor who teaches at both Sarah Lawrence College and Lesley University. A founder of the Dark Room Collective,a writer's collective that produced many of today's notable Afro-American writers, Ellis has won numerous honors and awards and is a contributing editor for the prestigious journal, Callaloo. Ellis won the Whiting Writer's Award in 2005 and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award in 2006. Mr. Ellis is also a photographer. Three of his pieces are included in this interview. Recently, I contacted him and asked him if he would like to conduct an interview with JuliusSpeaks, an idea which he enthusiastically endorsed. The following is what transpired.
Gentrification Is Dangerous, TSE 1986
1. Tell us something of your background. Where are you from? Are you married? Family?
I am from Washington, D.C. and many of the facts of my life are in my poems, real and imagined. I am not married in the same way that I am not metaphor. I am not single because poet means plural, a collective process and many collective utterances. I do think that it’s too bad that the places we are ‘’from” have to stay in one place forever. Yes, I wish land, the notion of local, were more mobile. Prosody, prose and song, must move.
2. What inspired you to become a poet?
I don’t think I was ever inspired to be one, but I am sure there were a great many other things that I could not be, so many so that poet was there waiting. It was always there––in the widest way. I was never without the possibility of it. I was full of it before I was anything else. At a very early age I was chased in my dreams and in my play by images and sound. A new definition of inspiration: the day images and sound caught me.
3. What does it mean to you to be a person of color and an artist in the United States at this time?
It means too many things to write but I am a Black writer in America and that means that I am Black and American, a double strengthened force, not an America who has been weakened or burdened by Blackness. Blackness adds range and elasticity to my American-ness. The task, however, is to write poems that continue language and poems that do not need the wave of time to become pertinent to readers. The struggle is to “live now” and to be relevant now, to look forward-back, and not backward-forward. We non white poets must also do a better job at defending our organic aesthetic handbooks. Too often those of us who don’t walk the way (in our lines) of academic logic get left out. Now is the time to make room for a vaster range of intelligences, triflin’ and proper.
4. You seem to be very aware of your audience. Do you have a target audience that you approach through your poetry? What is the audience that reads you?
I really am only aware of ears and there are too many of them to target. I approach each poem trying only to satisfy it, the poem. I hear it with my ears. We know poets read poets, mostly, and anyone else is extra. I try not to think about anything but the language and I am often also working against the poem being “about” a thing or one thing, but I always fail at that. There is something about English that traps you in the land of about which leads you to target by use of subject. Traditionally, a poem about Race has an audience and a poem about avocados has another audience. All I want is wholeness, for both audiences to come together and come apart in my odd body-toolbox, but only when I want wholeness.
5. You seem to play a lot with language in your poetry. Do you have a background in linguistics or philology?
No, but I am sensitive to the edges and insides and connotations and denotations of words. I believe in the syllabic integrity of every body part of every word. The front of a word is just as important as the end of a word, and the middle where the vowels often hide is both sonic and creamy. It may be fair to say that I have a front-ground in listening and that I am constantly trying to unlearn feeling.
6. Do you consider the technique and construction of a poem more important than the essence or the delivery?
I believe in Equality.
The Creative Process is the original Religion.
Poetry (not the poem) is
the echo of prayer.
Brown Girl,Brown Church, TSE 2011
7. Explain your approach to poetry- both in its written form and in regards to performance.
I sit down, in surrender, when I write.
I stand up, in triumph, when I read.
First I crawl
then I perform-a-form.
Must be the dog in me.
8. What would you say is the state of poetry in America today? Is there a vibrant poetry scene to be found? Is there innovation?
There is not a state of…
Poetry can’t be mapped
or polled or even populated.
The moment it vibrates
or nears “vibrant”
it becomes a disaster and people call FEMA.
It invents loss
but no one wants
to know that,
what, that earthquakes
are innovative.
9. How would you define yourself as a social and political being?
I signify one step ahead of those who gentrify aka my Party has not begun. It ain't late enough yet and the music ain't loud enough yet. Quietly poetry pumps up the volume!
10. The poem "Sticks" seems to be your most personal poem. Your poetry, unlike some others, does not reflect a lot of you in it. Why is that?
“All art is autobiographical.” I think Vincent van Gogh said that.
I am there, in the work and all over it. Americans are just lousy at reading nonlinear behavior in writing. I am there but not in the easy costumed way of “Confession.” A poem has to be visual and lyric but not necessarily a secretary to reality, or solely a service to experience. I would like to give the reader a reading experience that has its own breathing walk. Reader, surrender.
11. What is next for you?
It would be nice to turn my back on me or to meet me before “next.” I am going to try to be before me. I feel like my “next” has already happened and now I am going to spend some time running in the other direction ––away from intelligence, toward…
Black Like Jesus, TSE 2011
Thanks for this interview. It was a pleasure.
Have You Heard of the National Defense Authorizati...
Black Like Jesus: A Photo-Interview with Thomas Sa...
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Paul J. Zak and Jorge A. Barraza - The Neurobiology of Collective Action
The paper here, courtesy of Frontiers in Neuroscience: Decision Neuroscience (an open access publication), looks at the neurobiological mechanisms involved in collective action. Specifically, they look at the role of empathic concern and oxytocin in activating collective action.
From Wikipedia, here is a brief definition of collective action:
Collective action is traditionally defined as any action aiming to improve the group’s conditions (such as status or power), which is enacted by a representative of the group.[1] It is a term that has formulations and theories in many areas of the social sciences including psychology, sociology, political science and economics.
This is an interesting paper, despite the use of a mathematical model to explain human behavior.
The neurobiology of collective action
Paul J. Zak [1,2] and Jorge A. Barraza [1]
1. Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, USA
2. Department of Neurology, Loma Linda University Medical Center, Loma Linda, CA, USA
This essay introduces a neurologically-informed mathematical model of collective action (CA) that reveals the role for empathy and distress in motivating costly helping behaviors. We report three direct tests of model with a key focus on the neuropeptide oxytocin as well as a variety of indirect tests. These studies, from our lab and other researchers, show support for the model. Our findings indicate that empathic concern, via the brain's release of oxytocin, is a trigger for CA. We discuss the implications from this model for our understanding why human beings engage in costly CA.
Full Citation:
Zak PJ, and Barraza JA, (2013, Nov 19). The neurobiology of collective action. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 7:211. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2013.00211
How do people come together to achieve a common goal? This essay will argue that the physiologic drivers of collective action (CA) are the same mechanisms that are involved in the experience of empathy. Specifically, we present a formal model and describe neuroeconomics studies from our lab that have revealed empathy, and empathic concern in particular, as a crucial component of CA. Herein we review studies from our lab that demonstrate the neuroactive hormone oxytocin instantiates empathy and promotes prosocial behaviors, including CA (for other similar reviews of the human oxytocin literature see Bartz et al., 2011; De Dreu, 2012; Feldman, 2012; Guastella and MacLeod, 2012; Kumsta and Heinrichs, 2012; Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2012; Carter, 2013; for similar reviews focusing on neural activity see Shamay-Tsoory, 2011; Decety et al., 2012). We begin with the understanding that most CA is not done for purely altruistic or other-regarding motives. For instance, people may volunteer for a cause out of concern for others, but may also volunteer out of a felt or social obligation, to build their reputation, or to feel better about themselves (e.g., Omoto and Snyder, 1995). This review focuses on the role of one particular motive for CA: empathy. A biologically based human capacity, empathy has been found to motivate prosocial behaviors (e.g., Eisenberg and Fabes, 1990; Batson and Oleson, 1991; Penner et al., 2005). Empathy can promote CA by reducing self-regarding concerns and enhancing other regarding motives (e.g., Batson, 1991). We propose that empathy is a motive for CA, an adaptive human behavior with neurobiological underpinnings (for similar arguments see Brown and Brown, 2006; de Waal, 2008; Gonzalez-Liencres et al., 2013).
This idea was captured in Adam Smith's (1759) masterwork The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he wrote, “Generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem… please the indifferent spectator upon almost every occasion. His sympathy with the person who feels those passions, exactly coincides with his concern for the person who is the object of them” (Vol. 1, ch. iv, para. 313). In discussing sympathy, or “fellow-feeling” as Smith defined it, we will use the word empathy (a term derived from an 1858 coinage einfühlung or “feeling into” by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817−1881) that more closely captures the notion of an innate human capacity for one individual to respond to the experiences of another (Davis, 1996).
The literatures describing empathy are large and diverse (Batson, 2010), but our focus is on a narrower notion, empathic concern. Empathic concern is an emotion that is felt for another person (also see Barraza and Zak, 2013) and has been called the “root of all altruism” (McDougall, 1926). Empathic concern has been used interchangeably with notions of compassion (Batson, 2010), though we prefer the former term as being less generally used and thus less prone to misuse. Those who become aware of distress in others and are able to regulate the arousal that arises from it are more likely to experience empathic concern (Eisenberg and Fabes, 1990).
We begin by presenting a rationale for CA. Next, we introduce a neurobiologically-based model of prosocial behaviors in order to identify empathic concern as a proximal mechanism for CA. We then introduce evidence from recent studies from our lab suggesting a role for the neuropeptide oxytocin in producing empathic concern and inducing CA. Figure 1 summarizes the proposed relationships.
Figure 1. A physiologic model of collective action. Oxytocin induces empathic concern that increases the likelihood of collective action.
A Mathematical Model of Collective Action
CA refers to a set of behaviors that are performed with others to meet a goal or strive to make progress on a desired outcome. CA includes both cooperative behaviors (where two or more people work toward a mutually beneficial outcome) and collective helping behaviors (where two or more people work for the benefit of others not involved in the action). CA can be a single event (e.g., assisting someone who is drowning, pitching in money or time for a group picnic) or can extend over a long period of time (e.g., volunteering weekends at a retirement home, or the provision of public goods). Thus, CA includes a wide array of actions that are done for the benefit of others at some cost to the individual, whether or not these benefits extend to the self.
Why do people intentionally engage in behavior where the self bears a direct or opportunity cost? Game theoretic models derived from the prisoner's dilemma show that conditional cooperation is typically a better long-term strategy than consistent defection (Axelrod, 1984). These models, however, generally focus on why people would engage in behaviors that, although benefiting others, eventually benefit the actor. Tellingly, some forms of CA may provide little or no direct, immediate, or guaranteed benefit to the actor (Melis and Semmann, 2010).
Empathic concern for another's welfare may be a proximate mechanism motivating individuals to engage in costly CA. Empathic concern is a candidate mechanism for CA because it allows individuals to focus on the state of others, even in situations where there may be no direct benefit for the actor (de Waal, 2008). For example, empathic concern after a signal of distress or request for help, resolves the problem of reciprocal motives for CA where the actor benefits at a later time by placing weight on the well-being of others.
Behavioral scientists have found that empathic concern tips the scale in favor for prosocial engagement (e.g., Batson, 1991; Davis, 1996; Sober and Wilson, 1998; Preston and de Waal, 2002). The arousal: Cost-reward model of helping behavior (Dovidio, 1984; Dovidio et al., 1991) states that in order for people to be motivated to help others, they have to first become aware of the need of others for help. Aversive arousal elicited through emotional contagion makes the need for intervention salient. Aversive arousal then motivates a cognitive weighing of the costs and benefits for acting prosocially. Empathic concern is assumed to increase the costs for not engaging, for example, producing guilt, shame, and further distress if the observer does not help or cooperate. An explicit model of prosocial emotions such as guilt and shame prompting costly prosocial behavior was proposed by Bowles and Gintis (2003). Empathic concern may reward those who help others, for example, producing a so-called warm glow utility flow (positive affect for engaging in helping others; Andreoni, 1990) or other internal reward (Harbaugh et al., 2007) as we will propose in the model below.
The empathy-altruism hypothesis (e.g., Batson, 1991; Batson and Oleson, 1991), suggests that an empathic response is a necessary component in human prosocial behaviors. The arousal experienced from witnessing another's aversive state leads to divergent affective reactions, especially distress and empathic concern. Whereas distress (self-focused aversive feelings) motivates a desire to reduce aversive arousal, empathic concern causes one to attend to the other's aversive state. Those who are distressed may seek to escape the arousing situation (either psychologically or physically) when it is less costly than staying involved (Batson, 1987). On the other hand, empathizing with those requiring help makes it difficult to disengage without seeking to relieve the other's distress.
A large number of psychological studies have supported the link between empathic concern and prosocial engagement. Instead of reviewing this extensive literature (e.g., see Davis, 1996; de Waal, 2008; Batson, 2010), we use volunteerism to illustrate the role of empathic concern in CA. Volunteerism is a form of CA that occurs in the context of groups and organizations, where people give of their time for the benefit of a person, group, or cause (e.g., Penner et al., 2005). Volunteerism is interesting because it is long-term planned behavior (Penner, 2002). As such, volunteering is less influenced by situational factors than other prosocial actions. Further, volunteering is typically focused on aiding strangers to whom there is no social obligation (Omoto and Snyder, 1995). In general, volunteers have been found to be more dispositionally empathic than non-volunteers (e.g., Rushton, 1984; Bekkers, 2005). Those who score high in dispositional empathy anticipate feelings of empathy and satisfaction during volunteering and are more willing to volunteer because of those feelings (Davis et al., 1999). Individuals who report empathy-driven prosocial motives for volunteering, for example expressing values and concern for their community, are found to persist longer as volunteers than those who endorse self-oriented motives like enhancing their employability or to feel better about themselves (e.g., Clary and Orenstein, 1991; Penner and Finkelstein, 1998). These findings indicate that empathic concern is a key factor in motivating and sustaining one form of CA—volunteerism. In the model of CA that follows, we seek to clarify the mechanisms through which empathic concern and distress affect other-regarding behaviors.
The model we propose is a neurologically-informed extension of the model in Zak et al. (2007) that is based on a decade's worth of experiments using an inductive approach (Park and Zak, 2004; Vercoe and Zak, 2010) in which experimental treatments are systematically varied before a model is proposed. The goal in presenting this model is not to replace traditional game theoretic models of CA, but to extend these models to include the role of empathic concern during social interactions.
The model takes as its foundation a model introduced in a footnote by the prominent Irish social philosopher Edgeworth (1881/2012) in his book Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences where utility is obtained from one's own consumption and a weighted utility of another's consumption (Edgeworth, 1881/1967). Andreoni (1990); Sally (2001, 2002), and Levitt and List (2007) have proposed similar models without drawing on neural findings, while Morishima et al. (2012), develop a neurally-informed mathematical model based on theory of mind. Similar to Morishima et al. we propose a model steeped in experimental findings that can shed new insights into CA. The model differs from Edgeworth and the existing literature by including responses that are conditional on one's own, and the other's, physiologic states.
The decision-maker, who we will identify as person 1, faces the following decision problem:
where U(b1) is the utility person 1 receives from consuming benefits b1, b2 is the benefit that person 2 receives from person 1, U(b2) is the utility person 2 obtains from b2, and total resources, M, are finite. Assume U(b) is increasing, continuous and strictly concave. Person 1 chooses b1 and b2 through this constrained optimization problem. We will call this the Empathy-Collective Action model.
Edgeworth called the weight α on the other's utility “effective sympathy” (1881/1967, p. 53) and considered it a constant; using Lotze's definition of emotional contagion, we will call α “empathic concern.” Our Empathy-Collective Action model generalizes Edgeworth by identifying CA as an individually costly behavior and by taking into account the motivation for prosocial action by letting empathic concern depend on the situation the decision-maker faces. Specifically, let α(τ): [0,1]→ ℜ+ be a continuous hyperbolic function where empathic concern, α, depends on the observed distress of person 2, τ. The parameter τ captures the distress that motivates the decision-maker to pay attention to the needs of the other person. As previously discussed, “distress” should be understood as any situation in which the behavior or emotional state of another (or group of others) suggests that they may need assistance. The function α has the following properties, α(0)≥0, limτ→∞ α(τ) = 0, and τ* = argmax α(τ), with α(τ*) > α(0), and τ* finite. That is, α(τ) has the shape of a parabola.
The empathic concern function α(τ) is hyperbolic because moderate distress motivates action, but high degrees of distress are aversive causing one to want to escape rather than help (e.g., Batson et al., 1987). For example, if one sees someone sprain an ankle and fall to the ground, most people are motivated to help. Seeing someone with a bloody compound fracture of the ankle may be so distressing that many bystanders will flee and avoid helping. Alternatively, distress may arise from social pressures of inaction.
In the Empathy-Collective Action model, when α(τ) = 0, person 1 is completely self-interested, and when α(τ) = 1 s/he is other-regarding, sharing benefits equally with person 2. Values of α(τ) > 1 cause person 1, at an optimum, to offer more resources to person 2 than she keeps herself. It is straightforward to prove that as α rises, the benefits to person 2, b2, increase. Different values of α would account individual variations in empathic concern and resulting differences in individually-costly CA. Indeed, CA, where an individual bears a direct or opportunity cost during CA, requires a positive value of α(τ). The model's value is that is shows how individual variations in empathic concern (α) and the social environment (τ) can be included in a game-theoretic model of CA. If one exhibits low CA in a given situation, the model predicts that either empathic concern or one's perception of the needs of others (or both) is low. For example, an adult waiting to cross a busy street may not elicit costly CA by those nearby, but a small child alone seeking to cross such a street is likely to produce greater CA, especially among parents who may be more sensitized to children.
Our next task is to present neurobiological evidence showing that empathy affects CA.
Neurobiological Mechanisms
Knowing the neurobiology of empathic concern not only provides additional information on mechanism, but may also produce additional testable implications and applications (see Neurobiological Mechanisms). A large body of work now exists on the neural basis for empathy using functional MRI which have been reviewed in detail elsewhere (see Lamm et al., 2011; Shamay-Tsoory, 2011; Bernhardt and Singer, 2012). These studies generally locate empathy within the brain's pain matrix, specifically in the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula (Singer et al., 2004, 2006; Hein and Singer, 2008). However, these studies focus on the distress aspect of social engagement by studying responses to pain rather than the possible rewards of empathic concern.
The Empathy-Collective Action model of prosocial behavior that posits a utility flow or “warm glow” is consistent with findings from two studies using fMRI by examining donations to charities. Moll et al. (2006) found that brain regions differentially more active during donations to preferred charities compared to unpreferred charities included striatal regions associated with rewarding stimuli. These researchers also found that contrasting brain activity during charitable donations and individual reward revealed activation in the subgenual cortex, a brain region that modulates rewards associated with affiliative behaviors. In a related study of charitable donations, Harbaugh et al. (2007) found that donating to a charity, relative to keeping money for oneself, also produced activation in striatal regions of the brain. They further showed that voluntary donations to charity were associated with a greater subjective experience of satisfaction and larger striatal activation than mandatory donations.
The Role of Oxytocin
The best evidence for the role of empathic concern affecting CA would be to discover a manipulable neural mechanism that would raise or lower α in the Empathy-Collective Action model. The word “manipulable” is important here to demonstrate that such a mechanism directly causes CA. If we push on this mechanism (somehow), we would expect to see less self-focused benefits b1, and more other-focused benefits b2.
Oxytocin (OT) is an evolutionarily ancient molecule that is a key part of the mammalian attachment system supporting costly care for offspring. In socially monogamous mammals, OT and a closely related hormone, arginine vasopressin, facilitate attachment to and protection of mates (see Carter, 1998). Maternal (and in some species paternal) care for offspring is a template for more general other-regarding behaviors (Sober and Wilson, 1998; de Waal, 2008). In the human brain, high densities of OT receptors are primarily found in the amygdala, hypothalamus, and subgenual cortex (Tribollet et al., 1992; Barberis and Tribollet, 1996), brain regions associated with emotions and social behaviors.
OT can be measured in blood and cerebral spinal fluid, and synthetic OT can be infused into human beings intravenously or intranasally to gauge its effects on behaviors (Churchland and Winkielman, 2012). A key issue for studying OT in humans is that under physiologic stress, central (brain) and peripheral (body) OT co-release (Wotjak et al., 1998; Neumann, 2008). This means that a change in blood levels in OT after a stimulus is likely to be positively correlated with changes in OT in the brain. In addition, peripheral OT binds to receptors in the heart and vagus nerve, reducing anxiety and cardiovascular tone (see Porges, 2001, 2007) and thereby signaling approachability. OT binding in animals is associated with the modulation of midbrain dopamine and serotonin (Pfister and Muir, 1989; Liu and Wang, 2003).
Studies using OT infusion in humans have shown that it enhances the ability to infer others' emotions and intentions from facial expressions (Domes et al., 2007). OT also increases the time spent gazing toward the eye region of the face (Guastella et al., 2008), and the recognition of faces (Savaskan et al., 2008). Mice with the gene for the OT receptor knocked out have social amnesia—they do not appear to remember animals they have previously encountered (Ferguson et al., 2000).
Situations that motivate CA often involve a request for help. Such requests may provoke both empathic distress and concern as in the Empathy-Collective Action model. OT infusion has been shown to reduce activity in the amygdala in response to socially fearful stimuli (Kirsch et al., 2005) and fear conditioned stimuli (Petrovic et al., 2008). By reducing anxiety, OT may help people sustain CA over extended periods of time. Social psychologist Shelley Taylor calls this the “tend and befriend” role of OT (Taylor et al., 2000; Taylor, 2006), where OT reduces anxiety and promotes affiliative behaviors in response to stress.
Trust, Reciprocity, and Cooperation
Our lab was the first to demonstrate that OT promotes prosocial behaviors among human beings (Zak et al., 2004, 2005). We began this research in 2001 by examining the role of OT in facilitating trust between strangers. In these studies, we used a task from experimental economics called the trust game (Berg et al., 1995). In our trust experiments, participants were endowed with $10 to compensate them for their time and discomfort (see below). They were then given the opportunity to increase their earnings by making a single decision by computer and without coordinating with others using their $10. For this task, they were matched randomly in dyads with random assignment to the roles of decision-maker 1 (DM1) or decision-maker 2 (DM2). All DMs received extensive and identical instructions informing them that DM1 could transfer some of his or her endowment to the DM2 in dyad, and this amount would be removed from DM1's account and tripled in DM2's account. DM2 was then notified by computer of the tripled transfer from DM1 and was reminded of the total in his or her account. After this, the software prompted DM2 to return to DM1 any amount from zero to the account total. The return transfer was not tripled and was removed from DM2's account on a one-to-one basis. After these two decisions, the interaction was concluded. The consensus view in economics is that the DM1 transfer denotes trust, and the DM2 transfer captures reciprocity or trustworthiness.
So why would DM2 return any money, something participants do 98% of the time (Zak et al., 2007)? We found that the more money DM2s received, the greater the increase in OT. Importantly, the higher the spike of OT for DM2, the more she or he reciprocated by returning money to the DM1 who showed trust (Zak et al., 2004, 2005; Zak, 2012). Nine other hormones (e.g., vasopressin, estradiol) were ruled out for mediation or interactive effects, supporting the direct link between endogenous OT release and trustworthiness.
We next demonstrated the causal effect of OT on trust by administering 24IU of synthetic OT intranasally, a method utilized to enhance OT levels in the brain. After allowing for an hour for the OT to enter the brain, participants played the trust game. Not only did the average level of trust rise for those given OT, more than twice as many people on OT showed maximal trust by sending all of their money to a stranger (45 vs. 22% for those on placebo; Kosfeld et al., 2005). There was no effect of OT on an objective risk-taking task, providing evidence for its uniquely social effects. Moreover, the results were not due to changes in mood or cognitive blunting. These studies provide evidence that OT helps us determine who to trust and when to reciprocate, two key ingredients for CA.
Certainly trust can promote CA, but our trust research left open two important questions: are there non-pharmacologic ways to raise OT? and, is OT directly associated with empathic concern? In our trust experiments, the receipt of money denoting trust resulted in a substantial spike in endogenous OT relative to baseline. Prior to our work, the only known ways to raise OT in humans were to go into labor, to breastfeed a child, or to engage in sexual activity. These methods of raising OT are impractical for laboratory experiments, so we began to search for other ways endogenous OT might be manipulated. Research in rodents provided equivocal data that belly stroking might induce OT release. To test this in humans, we used licensed massage therapists to give participants a 15-min moderate pressure back massage. A control group simply rested quietly for 15 min on different days. Participants had their blood drawn and played the trust game one time. We found that massage raised OT (Morhenn et al., 2008, 2012), and for DM2s in the trust game, massage primed the brain to release 16% more OT than DM2 controls. Amazingly, reciprocation was 243% higher by DM2s in the massage group relative to DM2 controls (Morhenn et al., 2008). The change in OT strongly predicted the amount of money DM2s would sacrifice to reciprocate to DM1s.
We next undertook direct tests of the zero-sum Empathy-Collective Action model using a task called the Ultimatum Game (UG Güth et al., 1982). In this game, participants were again put into dyads and randomly assigned to the roles of DM1 and DM2. DM1 began the experiment with $10 while DM2 began with nothing. After extensive and identical instructions, DM1 was prompted by computer to propose a split of the $10 to DM2. If DM2 accepted the proposal, the money was paid. The catch was that if DM2 rejected the proposal, both DMs received nothing. In Western countries, offers less than $3 are nearly always rejected. We hypothesized that raising OT would increase empathy, α, and generate more generosity (generosity was defined as the amount a DM1 proposal exceeded the minimum acceptable offer by DM2s). Note that using the zero-sum UG, rather than a positive-sum trust game, sets the bar for the effects of OT substantially higher than in positive-sum games. In the trust game, we showed that OT was associated with reciprocity but that on average both DM1s and DM2s increased their earnings. In the UG OT was hypothesized to affect costly generosity in which more for DM2 meant less for DM1. This is just what we found. Infusing 40IU intranasally into participants caused an 80% increase in generosity relative to subjects who received a placebo (Zak et al., 2007). Generous participants left the lab with less money, but were not less happy on debriefing than those who were not generous. This provided the first evidence α could be manipulated by manipulating central OT.
The second test of the Empathy-Collective Action model used testosterone infusion to create “alpha males” in a double-blind cross-over paradigm (Zak et al., 2009). There is some evidence that testosterone inhibits OT binding to its receptor (Insel et al., 1993) and thus testosterone was expected to reduce generosity. This was indeed what we found. We raised total testosterone an average of 60% above baseline (free testosterone, and dihydrotestosterone, which are more active biologically than total testosterone, were raised 97 and 128% respectively; all changes were greater than zero at p < 1E-6). Men whose testosterone was artificially raised, compared to themselves on placebo, were 27% less generous in the UG. Moreover, the reduction in generosity fell rapidly as a man's level of total-, free- and dihydro-testosterone (DHT) rose, revealing a parametric effect of testosterone on generosity. For example, participants in the lowest decile of DHT had 85% higher average generosity ($3.65 out of $10) compared to generosity by those in the highest decile of DHT ($0.55 out of $10). Interestingly, the enhanced “alpha males” also had a 5% higher threshold (p = 0.001) to punish those who were ungenerous toward them. This experiment revealed that α could be reduced in the Empathy-Collective Action model.
In a third experiment, we examined whether endogenous OT was associated with the subjective experience of empathic concern by having participants watch a 100 s highly emotional video of a father and his son who has terminal brain cancer (Barraza and Zak, 2009). A control video had the same father and son going to the zoo but did not mention cancer or death. We found that watching the emotional video caused a 47% increase in OT relative to baseline. Importantly, the change in OT was correlated with subjective reports of empathic concern once we controlled for the distress that participants felt. We also found that those who were more empathically engaged made more generous offers in the UG, and generosity in the UG was associated with larger donations of participants' earnings to charity at the conclusion of the experiment. Participants who scored high in a measure of dispositional empathy (using the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, Davis, 1983), experienced greater empathic concern after the emotional video and had a larger increase in OT after viewing the emotional video. The participants who were most empathic and released the most OT were women; women were also more generous and gave more money to charity than did men. This study is the first to provide direct evidence that OT is associated with empathic concern, confirming the intuition of Adam Smith and the design of the Empathy-Collective Action model.
Defectors and Free-Riders
Defection is the death-knell of CA. When people begin to free-ride, for example in public goods games, others typically follow suit (Camerer, 2003). In our studies using the trust game using college students, we find that 95% of DM2s who have been trusted reciprocate. The degree of reciprocation for this 95% are predicted by their OT levels. The other 5% are unconditional non-reciprocators, they return nothing or very little money no matter how much they are trusted. We found that OT levels of non-reciprocators are abnormally high, indicating OT dysregulation. Psychologically, these people have traits similar to psychopaths (Zak, 2005, 2012).
We have recently extended this finding by studying patients with social anxiety disorder (Hoge et al., 2008). They, too, have high levels of OT. Because the brain works through contrast, high OT masks any additional OT release when receiving a signal of trust, thus inhibiting a behavioral response. Similarly, a study of those diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD), which is associated with a compromised ability to interpret social signals, showed an inability to maintain reciprocity in the trust game (King-Casas et al., 2008). This inability to cooperate seemed to be mediated by abnormal activity in the anterior insula, a brain region previously associated with empathy for pain (Singer et al., 2004, 2006); whereas psychologically healthy individuals showed a strong parametric relationship between amount received in the trust game and anterior insula activation, no such relationship was found for BPD subjects suggesting a possible empathy deficit in BPD.
Our discovery of the “five percent rule” for free-riders (Shermer, 2008; Zak, 2012) in a fixed institutional setting is important in understanding CA. It suggests that not all people can be expected to participate in a collective project, even when the issue is salient and people are highly motivated. When the social, economic or institutional environments are less than optimal, greater defection from CA will be expected as high levels of stress inhibit OT release (Carter, 1998). This is reflected in a low value of α in the Empathy-Generosity model, making the environment in which CA problems are solved important (Dietz et al., 2003). On the upside, our studies indicate that the majority of the population–including a study of aboriginal people in Papua New Guinea (Zak, 2012) release OT for a large variety of stimuli.
Collective Action Through Charitable Institutions
We have now conducted several studies examining giving through charitable institutions. Charitable donations are unique from other forms of CA as it is typically done without any direct exposure to the beneficiary or direct knowledge of how the individual contributions will be used. Though performed by individuals, charitable giving functions through the collective contributions made to an institution to address an issue of interest to its contributors. Barraza et al. (2011) examined whether 40IU of OT would increase donations in a lab donation task. Participant in the OT condition gave 48% more money than those in the placebo condition. This result was later replicated by others using a smaller dose (24IU) and a different charity (Van IJzendoorn et al., 2011). In another study, participants viewed public service announcements (PSAs) relating to social and health related issues after 40IU of OT infusion (Lin et al., 2013). Participants were given an opportunity to donate some of their earnings to the charities promoted in the ads. We found those who received OT donated to 33% of the causes while participants receiving the placebo donated to 21% of the featured charities. OT also increased the size of donation by 56% compared to placebo.
Another set of evidence comes from a growing body of research examining the association between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene, and social behaviors. Work from others indicated an association between OXTR SNPs and empathy (Rodrigues et al., 2009; Wu et al., 2012a) as well as prosocial behaviors (Poulin et al., 2012; Wu et al., 2012b). In a recent study (Barraza et al., in preparation) we explored if OXTR SNPs affected CA done through charitable institutions. Three of the OXTR SNPs examined (rs237887, rs2268490, rs2254298) were linked with making a charitable contribution in a laboratory task. Participants were also asked to report their donations to charitable institutions outside the lab. Here, an association between OXTR and monetary donations was found for rs237887 (AA donating more than AG/GG), and rs53576 (AA/AG donating more than GG). Individuals with AA/AG genotype of rs53576 were found to be more likely to donate to religious charities (versus GG). Unexpectedly, we discovered that these same participants (rs53576: AA/AG) were more religious than their counterparts (rs53576: GG). Mediation analysis and indicated that the association between rs53576 and donations was a result of the relationship between rs53576 and religiosity. A possible interpretation is that OT may function by promoting CA through membership in an existing group.
Ritual and Intergroup Behavior
CA involves both coordination with and a preference to affiliate with group members. It has been hypothesized that OT motivates cooperation especially for one's in-group by promoting (i) in-group favoritism, (ii) in-group cooperation, and (iii) defense-motivated non-cooperation toward threatening outsiders (De Dreu, 2012). OT administration increases bias for ones in-group when groups are formed for the experiment itself (De Dreu et al., 2010, 2011; Stallen et al., 2012). Although these studies provide evidence for in-group preference, they do not provide support for OT promoting antisociality toward an out-group (see Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg, 2012) and may be alternatively explained by OT's social saliency properties (Chen et al., 2011). Moreover, OT's in-group-specific effects may only arise out of zero-sum tasks between groups, where cooperation can only be performed at a cost to an out-group. Support for this interpretation was found by Israel et al. (2012) using a task that allowed for intergroup cooperation. These scholars reported that OT promoted both in-group and out-group cooperation, although those who received OT allocated more resources benefiting their in-group compared to placebo recipients. We have produced results that fall somewhere in between the DeDreu et al. and Israel et al. studies. In our study of charitable donations mentioned above, we found OT increased the size of charitable donations with a trend toward a preference for an in-group vs. an out-group charity (American Red Cross or the Palestinian Red Crescent Society; Barraza et al., 2011). It appears that OT may promote in-group CA, but may also support CA across groups when there is a collective benefit available for everyone.
Our lab has recently examined a different question: why do naturally existing groups engage coordinated and costly ritualistic behaviors? Human life is replete with rituals and we hypothesized that rituals may induce the release of OT to reinforce group attachment. In this project (Terris et al., in preparation) we examined OT release before and after rituals for several secular and religious groups. Groups also made decisions in several economic tasks, [trust game (TG), ultimatum game (UG), and dictator game (DG)] by computer, with in-group and out-group members. We found that OT significantly increased for some groups after performing ritual (marching in unison, singing religious songs), but not for others (Christian prayer). We also observed a positive correlation between positive regard toward the in-group after the ritual and how much one gave to one's in-group relative to the out-group in the TG and DG, but not the UG. No association was observed between OT change induced by ritual and prosocial behavior toward in- or out-groups. These results indicate that although some rituals increase plasma OT, the increase does not appear to influence in-group preferences. This work suggests that OT can unite people to act as a group, but does not necessarily injure out-group collaboration when there are shared interests at stake.
Trust in Political Institutions
Political actions, such as voting and campaigning, are another form of CA. Our lab has explored how OT administration affected trust in government officials and institutions during the 2007 Democratic and Republican primaries (Merolla et al., 2013). We found that participants given 40IU intranasal OT reported more agreement with the statement that most people can be trusted than those on placebo, especially when examining those low on pre-treatment interpersonal trust. Although OT did not directly impact trust in the government, we found Democrats on OT were more trusting of both Democrat and Republican politicians, and the federal government in general, when compared to those on placebo. When trust in government is higher, civic CA is likely to follow.
Generalized trust at the national level affects trust between individuals in the trust game (Holm and Danielson, 2005). Generalized trust levels strongly predict rates of economic growth in a cross-section of developed and less developed countries in part by facilitating CA (Zak and Knack, 2001). Generalized trust levels are also highly correlated with other forms of social capital such as paying taxes and other civic norms (Knack and Keefer, 1997), and trust and self-reported rates of happiness are very highly correlated at the country level (Zak and Fakhar, 2006) as are happiness levels and some forms of CA (e.g., volunteering; Post, 2005).
Most traditional evolutionary and economic models do not attempt to provide proximate mechanisms to explain the wide array of behaviors that are called CA. These models have caused some behavioral scientists to erroneously conclude that costly prosocial behaviors are “irrational” or manipulative, presuming that individuals engaging in CA are hiding behind a “veneer” covering their true selfish instincts (e.g., de Waal, 2006). We presented a neurobiologically-informed model of individually-costly behaviors that benefit others. This model, with the hormone oxytocin at its core, accounts for physiologic factors that are not provided in extant models, particularly for the role of empathic concern. It is also consistent with experiments we have run that reveal substantial amounts of costly other-regarding behaviors, even in blinded one-shot depersonalized settings.
Those unfamiliar with the existing body of research on oxytocin may be left with the impression of OT as a purely prosocial hormone. This is not the case. OT has been implicated with behaviors that could be considered antisocial including ethnocentrism (De Dreu et al., 2011), envy (Shamay-Tsoory et al., 2009), and less adherence to fairness norms in certain contexts (Radke and De Bruijn, 2012). Moreover, there are methodological concerns about oxytocin administration (Churchland and Winkielman, 2012; Guastella et al., 2012), and peripheral oxytocin measurement (McCullough et al., 2013). The state of oxytocin research is still in it's infancy. The Empathy-Collective Action model seeks to take these disparate findings and provide a game theoretic structure to understand how OT affects human social behaviors.
The strength of our approach lies in integrating methodologies and evidence across disciplines (Zak, 2004). More generally, our research on the neuroeconomics of social behaviors has revealed that empathic concern serves as an internal compass that can result in CA (Zak, 2011). Adam Smith was right on target, fellow-feeling does appear to be the basis for many moral behaviors and CA. Research from our lab has simply identified a neurochemical mechanism behind Smith's intuition.
We would like to thank the late Elinor Ostrom for valuable comments on an earlier draft. We also like to thank all of our colleagues and research assistants who have collaborated with us on many of the studies highlighted here.
References available at the Frontiers site
Posted by william harryman at Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Labels: collective action, empathy, groups, neurobiology, neuroscience, oxytocin, prosocial behavior, Psychology, research
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Home Culture & Art INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION
INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION
The prize was awarded to Nasrallah for his novel “The Second War of the Dog” which tells the story of Rashid, who turns from being a political activist in opposition to the current regime to a materialistic, unscrupulous extremist. Speaking at the prize-giving ceremony, Ibrahim Al Saafin, the chair of the judges panel, described the novel as“a masterful vision of a dystopian future in a nameless country” He said it exposed the tendency towards brutality inherent in society, imagining a time where human and moral values had been discarded and anything was permissible, even the buying and selling of human souls. Professor Yasir Suleiman CBE, professor emeritus of Arabic studies at the university of Cambridge and the chair of the IPAF board of trustees, said the novel painted “a chilling picture of humanity in all its destructive potential. Without a moral compass, the protagonist lets go of the normal bounds that constrain human behaviour”
Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted from their land in 1948. He spent his childhood in the Alwehdat Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan and began his working life as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked as a journalist and for the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation. Since 2006, he has been a full-time writer and acted as a mentor to emerging writers at IPAF’s writers’ workshops in 2014 and 2016.Four of his other novels and a volume of poetry have been translated into English. About “The Second War of the Dog” Nasrallah said he wrote the novel to “provoke the reader, to worry the reader, to even, sometimes, make them breathless” He described it as a “warning of what we could become in the future”
“The Second War of the Dog”was chosen by the IPAF judges panel from among 124 entries from 14 countries. Nasrallah was one of six shortlisted finalists. The five others were Amir Tag Elsir, Aziz Mohammed, Shahad Al Rawi, Walid Shurafa and Dima Wannous. Alongside chair, Ibrahim Al Saafin, a Jordanian academic, critic, poet, novelist and playwright, the 2018 judges panel comprised InamBioud, an Algerian academic, translator, novelist and poet; Jamal Mahjoub, a Sudanese-English writer and novelist; Mahmoud Shukair, a Palestinian short story writer and novelist; and Barbara Skubic, a Slovenian writer and translator.
The IPAF is run in association with the Booker Prize Foundation in London and sponsored by the Department of Culture and Tourism in Abu Dhabi.
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You are here: Home / DEADtime TV – Sleepy Hollow: “Deliverance”/”Heartless”
DEADtime TV – Sleepy Hollow: “Deliverance”/”Heartless”
Published by Ryne Barber on November 24, 2014 | Leave a response
Sleepy Hollow has been attempting to assimilate Katrina into its cast of recurring players for some time now, hinting that she might be joining forces with Ichabod and Abbie but never following through for extended lengths of time. Part of that has to do with her formidable magic – put Katrina into a situation, and she should easily be able to deal with it by casting a spell. The show can’t continue to keep her as deus ex machina, but it also has to come to terms with the fact that she’s an integral part of Ichabod’s life, and they can’t keep her on the outskirts forever.
Both “Deliverance” and “Heartless” pull Katrina into the storylines quickly. In weeks prior, Henry has been doing some work to get Moloch into the earthly realm, and his efforts prove to be successful: the spider that impregnated Katrina is the Horrid King Moloch, growing swiftly and pushing its way out of her very, very painfully. Much worse than regular childbirth, it seems.
It’s up to Ichabod and Abbie to whisk Katrina away from the Headless Horseman, and then Ichabod sort of flips out. Is it the Headless Horseman’s? Is it some other dude’s baby? It certainly can’t be Ichabod’s, and we hope to hell it’s not Henry’s because that would just be way too grody for a FOX show (there’s still some weirdness to the whole “old-looking son impregnating his MILF mom,” though). But once they start to see the demonic lines spreading across her tummy, they realize that it’s Henry’s game.
“Deliverance” is one of those convenient episodes where things fall into place at exactly the right time. Of course there’s a prism that can stop Moloch from being born thanks to an aurora borealis effect. Of course Ichabod gets there just in time to stop it. Of course there’s a near-death experience where it seems like Katrina will die. Sleepy Hollow consistently works with these elements of plot, all of the time, but it’s easy to accept them – it just seems par for the course.
It comes during a couple of solid episodes featuring both Katrina and Hawley. “Heartless” calls forth a succubus who collects souls to help bring Moloch into the world, because Henry’s not without his list of tricks, and Abbie calls on Hawley to help out with the deed. He lets on that maybe he’s a little bit attracted to Abbie, and even gets Ichabod’s blessing, which is a surprising moment since Ichabod is always more than a little hesitant to trust Hawley’s “expertise.”
“Heartless” is punctuated by these moments of characterization, where Hawley is allowed to sort of be a person instead of the mystical playboy that the show’s molded him into so far. He gets closer to Ichabod, revealing the inner struggles of his heart: it’s tough being a handsome man like him when Abbie won’t have him, and that revelation allows Ichabod to concede that maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all.
With this concession it becomes apparent that our gang of Witnesses will be evolving, to the chagrin of those that don’t really like Hawley. I can see why – he pops up at opportune times has little need to actually help Abbie or Crane – but if “Heartless” is any indication, the show is making an effort to at least make him a more important part of the proceedings. Yet it comes at the expense of Abbie’s sister and Captain Irving – they’ve been forgotten, for the most part, this season, and Sleepy Hollow isn’t juggling them well. It looks like next episode is coming back to that, so we have a little more to look forward to; I just hope that Sleepy Hollow can find a solid arc here, as it did at the end of the first season, because we’re coming up to the halfway point.
Posted in Reviews, T.V. | Tagged DEADtime TV, Deliverance, heartless, sleepy hollow
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The Lincolnshire Film Archive (Registered Charity No. 1000394) was set up in 1986 to locate and preserve motion film showing life and work in all parts of the County (including what was South Humberside). This web site includes the Latest LFA News, Information about the Archive, Contact details, and most importantly, up-to-date Listings of all motion picture held at the Lincolnshire Film Archive.
Lincolnshire - A Century on Film 4
Reel 4, ‘The Way Ahead’, is the latest in this exciting series and covers the early 1950s. With the ending of wartime restrictions, film once again became available to the enthusiastic cinematographer. In this DVD we see film of the bad winter of 1946-7, the first post-war Royal Show, the Festival of Britain, the humber ferry, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and the 1953 east coast floods. Plus much more fascinating motion picture film. Find out more...
Volume Three in the series covers the war years. In spite of the difficulties and wartime shortages, local film makers managed to produce a detailed record of this dramatic period in Lincolnshire’s history. Drawing on their film material, this DVD covers the period from the last desperate months of peace, right through to the Victory celebrations of 1945. Find out more....
Volume Two covers the decade leading up to the Second World War. With the availability of smaller, easy to use cine cameras, many more people were now recording their lives on film, Lincolnshire life seems to have been largely unaffected by the political and economic problems of the 1930s. Find out more....
The Lincolnshire Film Archive has launched a major new series of DVDs showing life and work in the historic county throughout the 20thCentury. Drawing on its extensive motion picture collection, much of it never before made available for home viewing, the film archive has set out to present a wide-ranging picture of a hundred years of Lincolnshire life. Find out more....
We are sorry, but for copyright and other legal reasons, we cannot supply copies of individual items in the Archive to members of the public. (Professional clients, please see Contact details.)
However, most items in the main Listings may be viewed by anyone at our premises on request. Viewing is by appointment only, and for not more than two people at a time. For larger groups, clubs, societies, etc, we can present a film show at your own venue. If you are intetested in booking a film show then please view our information leaflet (word document). To enquire further please ring 01205 750055.
Highlights from many of the items in the main Listings are featured in our Archive Video Compilations. These are on sale to the public, and this will often be your easiest means of access to our material. For up-to-date list of videos and details of how to order, see www.primetimevideo.co.uk. To enquire which items in the main Listings appear in the videos, please ring 01205 750055.
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Saudi Arabia committed to Aramco IPO: Crown prince
AFP, Riyadh
Saudi Arabia remains committed to selling shares in national oil conglomerate Aramco through an initial public offering but only at the right time, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said.
“We are committed to the IPO of Saudi Aramco based on appropriate conditions and at the right time,” Prince Mohammed told the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat in an interview published yesterday.
He reiterated his earlier expectations that the IPO of Saudi Aramco “will take place in (late) 2020 or the start of 2021,” almost two years later than expected.
Saudi Arabia plans to sell up to five percent of the world’s largest energy firm and hopes to raise up to $100 billion.
Prince Mohammed said it was still premature to announce where the IPO will be held, adding that many requirements for the sale to go through had been successfully completed.
Riyadh has taken a number of key procedures in preparation for the IPO including issuing a law for hydrocarbons tax, appointing a new board for Aramco and allowing an independent auditing of the kingdom’s oil reserves, the crown prince said.
Saudi Arabia remains committed to selling shares in national oil conglomerate Aramco through an initial public offering but only at the right time, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has said. We are committed to the IPO of Saudi Aramco based on appropriate conditions and at the right time, Prince Mohammed told the pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat in an interview published yesterday. He reiterated his earlier expectations that the IPO of Saudi Aramco will take place in (late) 2020 or the start of 2021, almost two years later than expected. Saudi Arabia plans to sell up to five percent of the worlds largest energy firm and hopes to raise up to $100 billion. Prince Mohammed said it was still premature to announce where the IPO will be held, adding that many requirements for the sale to go through had been successfully completed. Riyadh has taken a number of key procedures in preparation for the IPO including issuing a law for hydrocarbons tax, appointing a new board for Aramco and allowing an independent auditing of the kingdoms oil reserves, the crown prince said.
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Brief History of the islands of Malta and Gozo
Author: Joseph Borg
Malta is situated in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, halfway between Gibraltar and Alexandria, and Sicily and North Africa. Thus it has always been at the cross-roads of the trading and warring routes of this land-locked sea.
Malta is chiefly composed of limestone with no hills higher than 300 metres and no rivers. On the South-West side it is guarded by high cliffs whilst on the North-East side the shore is indented with sheltered harbours. These proved to be very attractive to the sailors and navigators that sailed the Mediterranean.
The origin of Maltese history goes back to some 4500 years BC, when some people from the neighbouring island of Sicily, who could see the island lying on the horizon, decided to cross the narrow waters to investigate. This obviously could not have happened unless these people had skills in sailing or rowing some form of craft which was large enough to carry with them their belongings, which included such animals as sheep, goats and cattle, as well as seeds like wheat and barley.
These people settled on the island and sheltered in the many caves which exist there. The earliest inhabited cave is called 'Ghar-Dalam', the cave of darkness, where remains of these people and their artefacts give us an insight into their way of life. They cultivated the land, growing wheat and barley and practised animal husbandry.
Around 3500 BC they started to build large buildings the like of which were not to be found anywhere else. They kept in touch with their cousins in Sicily obtaining from them obsidian and flint with which they could make tools to help them work the stones. These buildings, of which there are fifteen , are spread across the island. They are the oldest existing megalithic structures known to man - places like Hagar Qim, Mnajdra, Tarxien, etc. antedate the pyramids and Stonehenge by some 1000 years. This Neolithic peril about 1800 years, when, for no explicable reason, it ended abruptly. Nobody knows what happened, but famine, over population and disease could have been possible causes.
Around 1200 BC Phoenicia started to expand her empire. The Phoenicians were traders and great mariners who sailed their ships along the shores of the Mediterranean. They sailed to England where they traded tin. It is said that they circumnavigated the continent of Africa. They settled on the North coast of Africa and established a city called Carthage. They also settled on the West coast of Sicily and in Malta. Indeed, the name 'Malta' is said to be derived from the Phoenician word 'Maleth', meaning refuge. Their stay in Malta was to last for 320 years. Conceivably the roots of the Maltese language derive from this Phoenician period. The Phoenicians also introduced glass making and weaving and built temples were they could worship their gods.
Meanwhile, the city of Carthage grew in size and strength and eventually carved out an empire which covered the North African coast to the west of Carthage, and included Spain, Sardinia, Western Sicily and Malta. The Carthaginians got into difficulties with the Greeks in Eastern Sicily and with the arrival of Rome on the political scene during the 3rd century BC it was inevitable that the two nations would wage war for mastery of the area. Three wars, known as the Punic Wars, were fought from 264 to 146 BC ending with the fall of Carthage, and with Rome becoming supreme in the Central and Western Mediterranean. Malta became part of the Roman Empire during the 2nd Punic War (c. 218 BC) and remained part of the empire till the Vandals raided the islands in AD 395. One event of great importance to the Maltese took place in AD 5 8, when St. Paul, who was on his way to Rome as a prisoner, was shipwrecked on the Island. He stayed for three months during which time he introduced Christianity to the people. The Maltese take great pride in saying that they were one of the first nations to accept Christianity as their faith - but that is another story.
We now enter a dark period in Maltese history, the period from AD 395 to 535. No records exist as to what happened during that time. Rome fell the Vandals in AD 455 and it is quite likely that towards the end of the 4th century, Malta too became part of the Ostrogothic Kingdom centred in Rome In AD 535, Malta was conquered by General Belissarius the Byzantine to form part of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, till the arrival of the Arabs.
Islam started with the Hegira, when Mohammed fled from Mecca to Medina in AD 622. Before long his followers spread across North Africa into Spain and across the Pyrenees. Their expansion into Europe was stopped by the French King Charles Martel at Tours in AD 732, just one hundred years after the death of Mohammed. They invaded and captured Palermo in AD 832 and in 870 they invaded Malta. Once again Malta came in contact with a new and vigorous Semitic people.
Unfortunately, very little documentation relating to the two centuries of Arab rule in Malta survives today. Indeed, Arab influence in Malta lasted much longer, since the Normans, who invaded in 1090 and took over the island from the Arabs, were indeed enlightened people and they tolerated the presence of the Arabs in the island. In fact, Count Roger never garrisoned the islands. Arab influence remained more or less unrestricted till about 1224, when the Muslims were finally expelled. The chief legacy of the Arab occupation in Malta must be the Maltese language itself, which has many elements of Arabic.
Legends about the coming of Count Roger and the Normans to Malta are numerous, but most probably unfounded. Count Roger is said to have given Malta her flag based on the Hauteville colours. He is reputed to have re-Christianised the Maltese, established churches, re-appointed a bishop and even expelled the Arabs. All of this is doubtful. However, the Normans' presence opened the door for the re-Europeanisation of the Maltese people. The so-called Norman Period lasted till 1194 and though the Normans left many treasures and architecture in Sicily, hardly any relics of this period exist in Malta.
Following the death of King Roger II in 1154, a series of political struggles ensued. William the Good died childless in 1189 and a dispute arose over his successor. The rightful heir was the daughter of Roger 1, Constance, who was married to Henry VI, son of the German Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. However, the Pope had other ideas. Fearing the penetration of the Germans in Sicily and Southern Italy, the church threw its support with Tancred. He was crowned king in 1190. However, he did not last long because Henry VI, through a series of intrigues within Tancred's court, acquired Sicily in 1194. Thus Malta became part of the German Kingdom under Frederick II - the Hohenstaufen rule. The Arabs were finally expelled from Sicily and Malta after an uprising in 1224.
Following the death of Frederick II in 1250, the Hohenstaufen dynasty declined very rapidly. Many of Frederick's enemies, including the church, were keen to rid Sicily and Southern Italy of the Germans. Sixteen years of plots and counterplots eventually brought a new master to Malta. In 1266, Pope Clement finally achieved his objective and proclaimed Charles of Anjou as King of Sicily.
Although the period of Angevin rule over Malta was short-lived (1266-1283), it is from this point onward that Malta shifted into the European scheme of government and administration. Because of high taxation, moves were made in Sicily to restore the island to Aragon, the rightful heirs to the crown of Sicily. Things came to a head in 1282 with the Sicilian uprising against the French, known as the Sicilian Vespers, which led to a bloody massacre of the French. The Aragonese took immediate advantage and installed Peter of Aragon as ruler of Sicily and Malta.
The Aragonese period in Malta was to last for 130 years. During that time the Maltese people suffered the indignity of having their island handed from one noble to another as a fief for various services rendered to the king. These individuals increased taxation which led to local unrest amongst the people. Malta remained at the mercy of these powerful Sicilian magnates, like the Alagonas and the Moncadas. It was not till 1397 that the local council for Malta and Gozo, the Universita, made a strong petition to the crown for the islands to be restored to direct rule by the King.
In 1412, Ferdinand de Antequera was elected King of Aragon, Castille and Sicily, the first Castillian to ever occupy the throne. In 1421, King Alfonso granted the Maltese islands and all the revenue from them to Don Antonio Cardona in exchange for a loan of 30,000 gold florins. He then transferred his right over Malta and Gozo to Don Gonsalvo Monroy. The Maltese disagreed with this arrangement. After five years they finally rebelled. In 1426 they pillaged Monroy's house in Mdina and laid siege to his castle at Birgu. The Maltese bought back the island for 30,000 florins. They also insisted on radical reforms including one that said that the islands wore never to be ceded again by the crown. Alfonso agreed to these reforms and finally ratified them in a Royal Charter in 1428.
In 1479, Ferdinand II married Isabella of Castille. Their daughter Joanna married Philip Archduke of Austria. In 1518, the Habsburg dynasty was consolidated when their son Charles V, became the Holy Roman Emperor. Through the intercession of Pope Clement VIII, he granted Malta, Gozo and Tripoli to the homeless Order of St. John in 1530.
The Order of St. John came to Malta after the loss of Rhodes in 1522. They had been in Rhodes since 1309. Before that they were in the Holy Land where the Order was established in 1099 by Blessed Gerard to look after the pilgrims and the crusaders. The main enemy now was Turkey. The Ottomans were the dread of the Christian powers bordering the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Malta was becoming of supreme strategic importance for the control of the Mediterranean against the alarming growth of Muslim power. In 1547 the Turks made an unexpected attack on Malta and Gozo, taking many prisoners. The attack that followed in 1551 was more serious, for they ransacked Gozo and made off with 5000 prisoners. The Order was convinced that they must prepare the defences of the island for a bigger invasion. Soon afterwards, in 1565, a great Turkish armada appeared off the coast of Malta, starting what is now called The Great Siege of Malta, which was to last for four long months. When it was finally raised on the 7th September of the same year, many knights and Maltese had lost their lives, as did many Turks.
After the siege a new city was built, called Valletta in honour of the Grand Master who led the Order through the siege. This was to be a modem, fortified city, and eventually a city of culture and commerce. The city grew and so did the wealth of the Order. The threat of Turkish invasion was ever present. In 1572 the Turkish fleet was defeated by the Christian powers, including the Order, led by Don Juan of Austria at the battle of Lepanto.
In the years that followed, Valletta became an impregnable fortress, housing imposing palaces and churches. It also became a flourishing centre for trade and learning. Successive Grandmasters initiated grand projects, such as the building of many fortifications, aqueducts and a university, where the teaching of anatomy and surgery took place.
As time went by, however, the Order began to decline. The haughtiness and despotism of some of the Grandmasters upset the Maltese, leading to the famous Rebellion of the Priests, led by Mannarino in 1775 during the magistery of Ximenes de Texada. After the death of Grandmaster de Rohan (1797) the Order elected Ferdinand von Hompesch as its leader.
The situation in Europe at the time was explosive. The French revolution had changed the face of Europe and through the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte, 'The Directory' gave him permission to invade Egypt and take Malta in the process. In 1798 he invaded Malta and expelled the Order. Thus ended 268 years of rule by the Order of St. John.
French rule in Malta lasted only two years. The Maltese rebelled within three months of their arrival, besieging them in Valletta, from where, with the help of the British, they were finally ousted in 1800. The British occupied the island and for the next fifteen years the fate of Malta was undecided. The Maltese did not want the knights back and Britain was quite undecided as to whether it wanted to stay in Malta, but equally Britain did not want either the French or the Russians, who had their eyes on Malta for quite a while, to occupy the islands. The Maltese finally made up their mind and asked the British to stay. In the treaty of Paris, the occupation of Malta by the British was finally recognised. This was legalised in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna.
The Maltese got used to British rule but it was not long before the Maltese appealed to the British for equal participation in the running of their island. Mitrovich and Sceberras made extraordinary efforts for this cause, as a result of which a Council of Government was set up in 1835, a small beginning along the road to representative government.
Despite slow progress in the field of constitutional reform, Malta moved ahead, particularly in defence and imperial strategy. Malta benefited from increased defence spending by Britain. The dockyards were enlarged with five new dry docks being completed by 187 1. Malta prospered.
The Crimean War (1854-56) again brought considerable military activity to the island and Malta's importance as a supply station and as a naval base was unquestionable. When steam replaced sails, and after the opening of the Suez canal, Malta thrived. She was now on the highway between Europe and the East. With every ship calling, the grand harbour became a beehive of activity from which everybody benefited.
As usual the island's prosperity was quickly reflected in a dramatic rise in the population. This would continue well into the 20th century. From 114,000 in 1842, the population rose to 124,000 by 1851. Twenty years later it would reach 140,000 and it would more than double by the advent of World War II. With each increase, the problem of congestion, especially in the urban areas of Valletta and the Three Cities, would become serious. Attempts were made to encourage the people to move to the newer suburbs and the older towns and villages. Despite the prosperity, employment for the ever increasing work force would not always be available. Emigration schemes were introduced which initially were not successful. However, towards the end of the century, with the trade boom on the decline and Malta's fortune ebbing, the Maltese started to emigrate, mainly to North Africa.
The political situation in Malta before World War I was increasingly overshadowed by the economic gloom that engulfed the island. The position deteriorated over a long time due to competition from other well-equipped ports in the Mediterranean. Government revenue from the slower activities in Malta's ports was falling steeply. It became clear that Malta's dependence on Britain's military spending was a severe handicap. Whenever there was a cut in defence spending, the people suffered.
The winds of change in Europe and the gathering clouds of war also weighed heavily over Malta, and when World War I broke out, the people rallied to the allied cause. The naval dockyards again came into their own - but at the close of the war Malta had to once more face reality. There were to be severe cutbacks in defence spending. Much hardship and distress followed. Men were discharged from the army and naval establishments, unemployment soared and inflation ate its way into the miserable pay packets. There were strikes and protests. On the 7th June 1919 a huge and angry crowd gathered in Valletta for one of the meetings of the assembly. The pent-up frustration of the people suddenly exploded into a riot. The mob got out of control and caused much damage. Troops were called in and they opened fire. Five men were killed.
In 1921 Malta achieved responsible government. Under a new constitution she was to have a legislative assembly composed of 32 elected members and an upper house of 16 members. All internal domestic affairs were to be in the hands of the Maltese with Britain retaining responsibility for foreign affairs and defence.
Germany started the Second World War in September 1939. Malta was soon in the thick of it, once again coveted for its great strategic position in the Mediterranean. She was bombed very heavily by the Italian and German air forces and after two and a half years of never-ending air raids, the bravery, heroism and sacrifice of its people were recognised when King George VI awarded the Maltese people the George Cross Medal.
After the war Britain started the process of decolonisation. Malta too was part of that process, but her path to independence was slow and often uncertain. Self-government was restored in 1947, but the decision of the British Government to dismiss workers from the dockyards caused massive unemployment. Consequently, there began a great exodus of Malta's people to the United States, Canada and Australia, where work was available.
By 1964 a call for independence was made by the major political parties and after discussions with the British Government, an independence agreement, tied to a ten year defence and financial accord with the United Kingdom was finally approved. On 21 September 1964, Malta became a sovereign and independent nation within the Commonwealth.
Ten years later, Parliament enacted important changes to the constitution and on the 13th December 1974, Malta was declared a Republic within the Commonwealth and appointed Sir Anthony Mamo as the first Maltese President of the Republic of Malta. Five years later, the last of the British troops on the island left Malta and on 31 March 1979 the Union Jack was finally lowered. Malta had at last reached the goal for which its people had striven for many centuries - the ability to make decisions on their own for their own good and the good of their own people, without any interference from outside powers. Malta is represented at the United Nations, takes an active part in European affairs and has finally taken its rightful place amongst the nations of the world.
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MSC joins Super Y!
MSC bolsters competitive play in summer months with SYL NA Division play
Massapequa SC Becomes Super Y League Member
09/21/2018, 11:27am EDT
By SYL Staff
Long Island-based club highlights exciting growth in North Atlantic Division
TAMPA, Fla. – Massapequa Soccer Club, based in Long Island, New York, is the newest member of the Super Y League’s North Atlantic Division and will begin play in the 2019 season.
“We are thrilled to have Massapequa Soccer Club join the Super Y League ahead of the 2019 season,” said Dominic Colarusso, USL Manager of Youth League Growth & Development. “The club has a long, proud history of developing talented players and sending them to the collegiate ranks and beyond. Now, Massapequa SC has expanded the player development options available to its athletes through the Super Y League.”
Founded in 1970, Massapequa Soccer Club’s primary goal is to develop its younger players with an eye on preparation for the different levels of match conditions. The club wants to continue to preserve the passion for the game for players and families while providing a platform for future success at the high school and college levels.
“Massapequa Soccer Club is looking forward to being part of the future growth of Super Y League, and being the best partner the club can be to assist and promote the league’s vision and growth in the years to come,” said Paul Bigilin, Director of Coaching of Massapequa Soccer Club. “It has become very important for our Club to be associated with the right leagues and organizations that foster and encourage player development, coaching and player game day standards, while still embracing the match day experience for all players and families for the good of the game.”
Massapequa SC is the first announced new member of the 2019 North Atlantic Division. Additional high-performing clubs in the region, as well as across the country, are set to be revealed as members by the Super Y League in the coming weeks and months.
To stay up-to-date with Massapequa SC, follow the club on Twitter or visit www.massapequasc.com.
A part of United Soccer Leagues, LLC, which also operates the United Soccer League, a new third-division professional league and the Premier Development League, the Super Y League features a summer platform with an annual North American Championship in December.
Super Y Player Benefits
USL Partner Club Experience
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Aprill 4, 2005
Reminds me of the "old days," back at Woodrow Wilson Elementary. I had no idea - as a third grader - who Woodrow Wilson was, but I sure liked his school. My dad wasn't into sports, so the only serious "ball bidness," for me, happened during recess and lunch. Fall was Kickball Season (inspired by the NKL, I guess).
Leadership emerged early, though I didn't realize it at the time. You may remember those "survival of the fittest" days; that was before the more enlightened era of "protect their self worth" thinking. How brutal can you get: we did The Apprentice - in reverse - every day during recess ...
How so? Well, it was a small school yard, with only one available diamond (the "big kids," from 4th to 6th got the main lot). Bobby Benjamin and I were - I guess - the Alpha males in the mix. We were the "captains," without ballot or confirmation. Our job: pick teams. "I'll take Jimmy." "I got Tom." "Ricky, com' 'ere." "Timmy's mine." Back and forth we'd go ... and the "last kid picked" natural selection was, once again, demonstrated. The ultimate pecking order; Trump says, "You're fired!" We said, "You're picked!"
From then to now, I've always been intrigued to find out how people get picked for stuff. Too often, there seems to be a complete lack of cogent, intelligent intentionality. More often, factors of secondary importance seem to make the primary difference in naming nominees. Honestly, Benjamin and Shank were pickin' favorites; the score never varied much, based on who got first round draft choice. We just decided to play with our buddies, whether they were World Class Kickballers or not. Is that fair?
Over the last few days, the whole world has been plunged into the center of the Catholic community's grief in the death of their much-loved Pope. Karol Wojtyla - the Polish priest-turned-cardinal who was the dark horse pick of the College of Cardinals in October of 1978 - will be respected and remembered for the next two weeks, while the red-capped leaders charged with assembling to select his successor prepare for their daunting task.
Just moments after his fellow cardinals elected him in '78, John Paul II took a moment to marvel at the fact he was chosen. He asked one of his key supporters, Cardinal Franz Koenig of Vienna, "How did it happen?" Koenig replied, "Holy Father, we're bound by secrecy." In a modern version of that same secrecy, the 117 Cardinals will convene to pursue the identity of their next leader. Though allowed by code to choose any Catholic male in good standing (even a layman!), tradition over the last thousand years will limit the pool to the princes of the church who are in the meeting. Their deliberations are so privileged that their vow to confidentiality carries excommunication as the penalty for a leak. No one will know "God's choice"... until the white smoke emerges from the chimney over the Sistine Chapel. Watch for the smoke ...
Kickball selection. Papal succession. Divine election. Time after time, we're faced in life with having the same question come up, in different places, involving different participations. Who's on the team? Who gets to pick? How will they decide? What about the people who wanted it, who didn't get it? What if the person picked didn't want it? Is the whole deal really fair? Isn't there a better way?
When it comes to the guest list for heaven, there's an even more significant outcome at stake. Kickball lasted through recess; the papacy lasts for life. Eternity lasts forever. Who gets to pick?
When you get to heaven, you'll be as amazed at your welcome as Karol Wojtyla was when he was announced in '78. You'll say to Peter, "How did it happen?" He'll say to you, "Beloved brother, we're here by His election." Paul calls believers "... brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. He called you to this through our gospel, that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ..." (II Thessalonians 2:13-14)
In some incredible way, God picked you to be saved ... but didn't tell you about it until you picked Him to be the captain of your team. More mystery than the Cardinals pickin' a Pope? It's God ... pickin' you, and pickin' me. It made no sense; we hadn't earned it. We picked Him; He picked us. We'll get it straight when we get there. Till then, we'll keep singin' Amazing Grace ...
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NC Dinos bring in Smolinski to replace Bethancourt
Korean baseball club NC Dinos have acquired former major league outfielder Jake Smolinski.
Smolinski will replace Christian Bethancourt in the Dinos’ lineup. Bethancourt was waived by the KBO club on Wednesday, after batting .246/.308/.404 with eight home runs and 29 RBIs in 53 games in his first season here.
KBO clubs can each carry up to two foreign pitchers and one foreign hitter. On Wednesday, the Dinos released Eddie Butler and brought in Christian Friedrich, who will join Drew Rucinski in the rotation.
Smolinski, 30, played in 234 big league games for the Texas Rangers and the Oakland Athletics between 2014 and 2018, putting up a .235/.299/.363 line with 16 homers and 67 RBIs.
This year, Smolinski has been playing in the Tampa Bay Rays’ Triple-A club, Durham Bulls, hitting 12 homers and knocking in 46 runs in 67 games with a .270/.360/.504 line.
The Dinos said they liked Smolinski’s on-base skills and his range in the outfield.
The Dinos are currently holding on to the fifth and final playoff spot at 40-42, only two games up on the surging KT Wiz, winners of seven straight games as of 6 p.m. on Thursday.
The Dinos were in third place at the end of May at 31-25, but they tied for the KBO’s worst record in June at 8-16.
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October 19, 2017 admin Comments 19 comments
We know that narcissists are pathological liars. What was the worst lie they ever told you? Before I went out with my ex-partner he told me, “I’m not a bad man, Anne.” I’m not sure if he was trying to convince himself or me but boy, was that a whopper!!
How Do You Deal With A Psychopathic Boss?
Being Alone Doesn’t Always Mean You’re Lonely
19 thoughts on “Discussion Board”
Tracy Lay says:
When I met my second husband,he told me his ex was crazy and his kids.He also said he hated drama.He truly is the king of drama,his kids are apples didn’t fall far from the tree.
Margaret Kane says:
I was with my ex 23 years. Throughout them he lied to me from day one. And I blame myself every day for my stupidity although I am 47 with 2 children by him.
The first lie he told me was that he was never married before when he had been with 2 children.
The second was that he was still married when he married me. But never registered ours as he would have committed bigamy if he had.
I never knew until I tried to divorce him. He has since remarried. Why do people get away in life with these acts yeto move on Scott free. Without any remorse or regret.
Mine said, “I am a Christian”. BWUAHAHA. A lustful adultering one, that is.
The worst lie she ever told was “I love you.”
Douglas says:
That she served in the Air Force in Iraq and was and still is working secret Black Ops for the US Government.
Jenni says:
That “I will change”. That was the biggest and the best among many.
They never do
I knew he was lying over and over again throughout the four years we were together, but rarely could I prove it. I had finally managed to get him out of my home, after lying yet again, but being caught red handed. His mom was dying at the time. About a month later, he contacted me, and I allowed myself to get sucked back in.
When we reconnected he told me his mother had passed away. For the next two weeks he would visit, and tell me what a bachelor pad his dad’s house had become. Just his father, him and my ex’s son were staying there at that point.
Imagine my surprise when two weeks in he gets a phonecall. I could hear the person on the other end, and it was his mom! I confronted him. He called me an evil c**t, and stormed out of my house.
That’s the last time I laid eyes on him. Six months later, and he still tries to contact me, but I’ve managed to block him everyway I can. I don’t even care what he has to say at this point. What kind of person lies about the death of their mother???
My husband’s ex narcissist had a family member tell him she was dead.
Probably the biggest one was when my husband told me he nearly died in a kayak trip in Scotland. There was no kayaking trip, no near death, he made it up to elicit sympathy and to distract me from the fact that he was in Scotland with his girlfriend for a week, rather than on one day layover in England for a trip he considered me too emotionally fragile to accompany him on.
Or maybe it was when he told me a stock had finally paid off so he had money to pay off our cars and buy a new ATV which he immediately stripped down and upgraded entirely. Turns out the money was from the sale of gold coins his girlfriend stole from her family member. When the truth came out, we lost all our vehicles to that family member in restitution.
I could go on but those are a few standouts. He’s not my husband anymore.
My ex husband told me after 3 weeks of being together that he is sure he’s capable and ready for a healthy relationship. Red flag or what!!!!
The biggest, most hurtful lie? “I love you.”
JXM says:
That he loved me. That was when I was finally leaving him just over two years ago. Till then he would never say it, just implied like everything else. 800 miles away and no contact after an 8 year relationship.
I’m sorry. Its the biggest lie I’ve heard and boy have I heard some big ones.
I have a teenager with Conduct Disorder who is a birthday away from an anti-social personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis. Other than the I’m sorry lie was the lie that a family member was using her in a human trafficking ring. Doctors have told us that at this age there is no way to help unless it is something she wants. She doesn’t want it because she is never wrong.
People say go no contact or walk away. You can’t do that when you are legally responsible until they are 18.
Lolly says:
Gee, I can’t decide if being told multiple times I was adopted was the whopper or if it was the 100 times I was told I was selfish.
I know being told “you’re adopted” by a sibling when it’s a lie is supposed to be funny and a common mean thing a sibling says to get under a sibling’s skin. IT WORKED. Hahaha. So funny.
Except, looking back, it’s the first of many, many times my narcissister has tried to ostracise me. There were a couple of times when I was little that she literally locked me out of the house and told me to go live somewhere else! Haha! Again, so “funny.”
She is still doing it today. “You don’t belong here anymore.” “Get out,” “Drop off.” “Go away.” Except now her flying monkeys say it for her.
Paddy says:
The biggest lies are the ones invented about their character. Some Narcissists have everyone convinced they are a Saint. They also keep their enablers convinced for a long time. I was conned by a former Irish MEP who is still in a position to deceive. I worry about people who could be under their influence, both now and in the future.
Laurence Close says:
I have just returned from France where I had moved and given up everything to be with someone I adored and thought loved me. He told me that he had Leukaemia and five years to live. The whole Pathological Narcissist idea is all new to me but my partner ticks every single point on this site that indicates that someone is a Narcissist. He has destroyed all my confidence in myself and I am broken right now but I will fight back and be who I once was again
While he was “working away” and I was at my home with a broken leg, that he had been admitted to hospital with an incurable disease and the specialist said there was no more they could do for him. I was totally devastated as I couldn’t even leave my house let alone get to the hospital several hours drive away. After having lost my late husband to cancer, this hit me extremely hard. The devastation was worsened when one of my loving messages to him was intercepted by the new woman who he had moved in with, telling me he wasn’t in hospital, never had been and the disease he was supposed to have was what her grandfather had died of. I had no idea of her existence but we befriended each other and compared notes to find he had been sleeping with us both while saying we each were the love of his life. The trouble is by then I was trauma bonded.
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Miss Nyx
by Kita
Miss Nyx is a woman full of surprises. With a passion for experiencing life, she's utterly dived into her art. Between modeling, and dancing a large array of dance styles, she's successfully managed to express herself in countless forms. A little bit cheeky, a little bit "take-no-shit", and a whole lot of energetic, her work has shown a variety that is hard to come by.
An Idaho native, who found her way to Salt Lake City, she's tried a wide array of jobs and lifestyles. However, what sticks out to me the most about all of this, is how strongly she's been able to grip onto her own sense of self and preserve who she truly is throughout it all. She's a kind woman, with a twinkle of humor in her eye, but she's honest, and upfront in a way that's hard to find these days. Her chest tattoo even brazenly states, "Pretty Fuckin' Self Spoken".
Nyx's work has attracted attention from audiences and other performers alike. Not one to follow trends, her work expresses exactly where she's at when it's happening, and plenty are taking notice. Easily one of the most unique performers in the SLC valley, Nyx has a vision and a story to tell, and I don't recommend missing it.
The Interview:
Kita: So what first got you into performing?
Nyx: When I was pretty young, my mom put me in the general ballet-jazz-tap classes for little kids, so I started out around five. She pushed stage performance on me; I did a lot of stand-up, I did a lot of monologues, I had my own half hour public access channel television show for about two weeks. From there, it just kept going. I thought I was going to be doing a lot of acting, but that never did it for me. Eventually I moved solidly into dancing, and that's really where I've stayed.
Kita: From that point, where has your style evolved to?
Nyx: So I started "on-purpose" dancing, where, you know, it wasn't just my mother signing me up, when I was about nineteen or twenty, and it was belly dancing with a lady named Zidora, out of Boise, Idaho. It was very basic, very Egyptian style. And cabaret style belly dance just doesn't look good on me. So then I went to Germany for three years with the airforce, and when I came back, I discovered Rachel Brice. I immediately fell in love and decided that American Tribal Style was exactly what I had to do. I joined up with a troupe in Salt Lake City, who did very American Tribal Style, and around the same time, I started up with a troupe called Dragomi, who did a very dark fusion style. It was very earthy, very grounded, full weight on the heels style of movements. And that took off really well in the community, and with me, personally. So I really grew from there, and started adding in things I learned from clubs, things I saw in videos, pop and locking, a little bit of ballroom, a little bit of jazz, some modern, cabaret, just whatever I could find. Now, I don't really have a nameable style.
Kita: Because you're so heavily into fusion, have you gotten any trouble from any of the purists of the styles?
Nyx: No one's ever said it to my face. I'm positive that some of them feel less than enthusiastic about it. I personally have been to belly dance events when I was first starting out actively performing, and I would go, "That's not belly dance! She can't do that here!" So even I've been there. And people who are focused on purity of particular forms, you know, that's their thing, they're preserving something. It's just not what I do.
Kita: Do you prefer the creation and the learning or do you prefer the performance?
Nyx: I don't know if other performers do this in a similar fashion, but when I'm doing solo work, I have a strong tendency to absolutely fall in love with one song. Just head over heels. The rhythm, the pulse, the tempo, the meaning of the lyrics, it's exactly what I want to dance to right then. It's perfect for me, and I will dance the shit out of that song until I have a solid choreography that makes me thrilled to practice it. And then I will perform that once. And then I never want to hear that song again. So, I guess, I do get a lot of satisfaction out of the creation process, but the actual performance, sending a story out into the audience, and having them see it, and understand it, and respond to it, and having them sending back their own energy in the form of yelling or clapping, or whatever, I live for that part of it.
Kita: What's been your biggest struggle with dancing?
Nyx: I'll name two. One is staying motivated. Staying motivated without a class, a troupe, a teacher, or any of that can be incredibly hard sometimes. There are a lot of people in the community that just push through those times, and just rock them, and then they're back to their motivation, but I'm not that person. I lose my motivation, and it's chocolate and cookies time. I'm pretty much done. But, I'd say bigger than that, the reason I stopped dancing as much as I used to and narrowed it down to solo work is the community. The community may be different in other areas, but the movement performance community in Salt Lake is so ridiculous. How little we are supportive. The Salt Lake City community in general doesn't support movement artists very much unless they're in a classical form, you know, like ballet, jazz. And so the movement artists who are out on the street, practicing in the park, or in their living rooms, will put a show together that took six months to organize, they get volunteers, they get people to donate stuff, they put together raffles, they make it a charity show, and they get maybe ten people to show up who aren't other dancers. And that makes it hard. Because when you're in a community, the thing that keeps it alive, that keeps it growing and moving is seeing new stuff. And if the only people who are coming are the other dancers, you don't get new input, you don't get new infusions of ideas. It gets stale, and I think that's a big part of the reason you can find so much interpersonal drama among many of the performers. I've never been part of a community that was so over the top with the soap opera episode type drama, and I think it's because we get stuck in this little bowl with only each other for company, and we don't deal with it well. We don't know how to go out and recruit new people very well to come in and see and share our stuff.
Kita: How about the people closer to you? Are they supportive?
Nyx: If they weren't, they wouldn't be around me. My friends are fantastic. People will come to my shows, they'll watch me rehearse, they'll give me critiques on my outfits and that sort of thing. I think people are generally interested in seeing it, and getting involved with it.
Kita: How about stage fright?
Nyx: Well, as I said, I've been onstage in one form or another since I was five, and that's (insert massive coughing fit here) number of years, and I could have a rock solid choreography, that I could do in my sleep perfectly, and every time I go onstage, I get the shakes. I get shake-y, I get nervous, but the second the music starts, you've got two ways to go. You can do it, or you can be afraid. And if you do it, it rocks, every time.
Kita: Would you say from the point you were at when you first started branching out, to now, your goals have changed a lot?
Nyx: Absolutely. Yes. A lot. When I first started actively performing belly dance, I just wanted to be neat, I wanted to do something that was fun and different. In the belly dance class I was in, I learned that when you are doing belly dance, you are sparkly, and smiley, and bouncy, and you have long hair, and so those were the things I aimed for. I wanted to fit into that little niche. I did pretty well, for as well as I can really do cabaret style belly dance, but now? Now, I don't want to look like I'm doing a style. I want to look like I am onstage dancing. That's what I want people to see. I want them to see the character that I am creating, the story I'm telling. I don't want to be doing that through someone else's form.
Kita: So you also do modeling. Do you find the two coincide at all?
Nyx: Absolutely. Being able to dance increases your body perception by leaps and bounds. So it's easier for posing. It's easier for someone to say, "Keep your feet and your hips where they are, turn your shoulders toward the camera, and lift your chin higher." It's easier to isolate those things if you have more experience talking to your body parts. So yes.
Kita: You've done nude work. What got you to start doing that?
Nyx: Well, I like me naked. So I figured I'd like to have a picture of that. So when I ran into a photographer who wasn't creepy about that, we tried some stuff out, and it turned out amazing.
Kita: Are a lot of photographers creepy then?
Nyx: I haven't gotten to that point with a lot of photographers. So far, I have done nude photoshoots with a couple of photographers. It's not so much creepy like, "Hey, little girl..." It's hard to explain. I had a photoshoot with a guy once, and I was modeling a corset that his partner had made. I had a long sleeve shirt on underneath, I had some pants on, and we're doing the photoshoot, and at one point, I was laying down on a fur rug. He just had me rolling over and over like a log roll, and he was asking me to do stuff like pull my shirt open at the top, and squish my elbows in on the side of my breasts. I was like, "Can you even see the corset in these?" And he just looked at me, and was like, "Oh! The corset!" He had completely forgotten the corset and was working towards me not being in the corset. So stuff like that happens a lot. I don't think it's so much creepy, as people get excited, and want to see where everything goes. But I would rather have a situation where I can just sort of lounge around, and be naked, and be pretty, and have that be the point than have it be a situation where they feel they have to sneak up on it because I might get skittish and leave.
Kita: What have your biggest anxieties with modeling been?
Nyx: Being murdered in the desert.
Kita: That's a good anxiety to have.
Nyx: Yeah! Granted, it's never been a huge worry. But I've never been concerned about looking silly in a picture, or doing something people might not like.
Kita: So what about your biggest struggles with modeling?
Nyx: Finding photographers I like. It's kind of like trying to go to a show where you know you'll be dancing for other dancers, so everyone's going to be very well informed, and you're trying to pull off doing something that is new and unique and doesn't look like stuff that everyone else is doing. So finding ideas that are new, exciting, sexy, and fun, but that aren't all over the internet already is a big challenge.
Kita: So what do you do to get ready for a photoshoot?
Nyx: It depends. For certain really casual, artsy photos, I won't do anything in particular. But for a photoshoot once, I did full body paint, and a big set, and prosthetics were being made for this. I slimmed down with the Atkins diet for two weeks, I did a lot of cardio, and a lot of stuff to trim my figure down. For the most part, I just make a half-hearted attempt to not eat too much candy.
Kita: And with a dance show?
Nyx: Practice. One of the things I do like about the community here is really that, if I were to go to an expo downtown, and do a performance, I would feel a bit of pressure to be toned and in shape, and at the top of my game. And with a belly dance show, it's not that I shouldn't be those things, or that it wouldn't be better, but I know that if I get onstage and my stomach is pooching out over my pants a little bit, no one is going to be sitting in the audience going, "Oh my God! She has let herself go!" In this community, it's not even a blip on the dial. And if it is, you probably do cabaret and I don't care.
Kita: With either modeling or dancing, what inspires you?
Nyx: That's hard to say. I want to have something profound here to say like, "My family," or something, but
really, it's more like, one day I'll find a song that I really like. And I'll do that. Or I won't. But I never really know.
Kita: If you want my opinion, that's more profound than saying something like, "My family," because it makes it sound more like that's just how you react to life.
Nyx: Yeah! That! What she said!
Kita: Outside of dancing or modeling, what other forms of art have you wanted to get into?
Nyx: I kind of a dabble a little teensy bit with photography. I will occasionally write, as a form of catharsis, and when I do, it's pretty impressive. I like my writing. But I've never been a huge fan of painting, drawing, sculpting and that sort of stuff. I like the crafty stuff, like crocheting, or I can sew a pair of pants together that are pretty cute. Stuff like that. I like making things, but maybe not art.
Kita: So have you had struggles with working an ordinary job and doing your art on the side?
Nyx: To a certain extent. Finding ways to do it is easy, I feel. But finding places to hire me while I'm doing it is a little harder. I have a lot of tattoos, I do a lot of fun things with my hair, so it can be hard to find a job
while all that's going on. But right now, I feel happier letting myself do the rest of those things despite the fact that it might affect things in rest of my life than I would if I did have an easier time with a job, but I didn't have, you know, purple hair and tattoos.
Kita: Have you had a lot of trouble with feeling drained?
Nyx: It depends heavily on the job. For example, I just left a job with a company where I worked right out at the front desk. They weren't terribly straight laced, but they were still pretty normal. I couldn't even allow my arm piece to show, I couldn't have my hair dyed any unusual colors, extensions were absolutely out of the question. You know, so I had a solid, steady job, great benefits, thirteen paid holidays a year, good insurance, ect. ect., but I'm the lowest paid person in the building, and expected to adhere to the highest social and physical standards. It feels unfair, and against my nature, which is draining. So at the end of the day, do I want to dance? Well yeah. But do I want to get off the couch to do it? Absolutely not. I just had a shit day doing stuff I don't believe in for eight hours. I don't want to dance right now. Now, the job I have right now? I go in and I work on things with my hands all day, and then I go home. I get to have my pink hair, and I get to let my tattoos show. I get home, and physically, I may have had a harder day, and mentally, I may have had more challenges, but my soul? I haven't squished it in a box. So it's ready to go. It doesn't need unpacking, or ironing times. It's out of the box, onto the dance floor. And I'm happy.
Have anyone else you'd like us to chat with? Suggestions are taken in the comments below!
Jorge Arellano
Is there such a thing as accidental art? When Jorge Arellano was a teenager in a punk band in Mexico City, he claims to have fallen into stencil art without knowing there was even a movement of the same kind in existence. “ I started a band with some friends, and we needed a logo for our band,” he says. Arellano gathered a set of images that sparked his fancy, cut out some stencils using an old sewing needle (how punk is that?!), and spray painted the first of what would become many works of art expressing his own political messages. Is there such a thing as accidental genius?
Jorge continued to dabble in graffiti and stencil art, but his passion for it really ignited around five years ago, and the artist made the decision to pursue it full speed and full time from the studio in his basement (by the way, he’s still singing in a punk band, too). He couldn’t care less about making money with it, and actually likes to leave pieces on the street as a sort of “gift,” or give them away when he knows a patron will really appreciate what he has created. His main inspirations are politics, current events, and women's rights. “When there is something that is bothering me and I feel it needs to be told, this is my way of expressing it.” We had the pleasure of sitting down with Jorge, who is a surprisingly down-to-earth and upbeat political activist. We left with a feeling of excitement, and with positive expectations for the future of street art in Salt Lake City.
Mandy: What kind of artist are you?
Jorge: I like to say I am an urban artist, and the technique I use is stencils.
Mandy: How did you learn to do that?
Jorge: It was kind of like an accident. I started first in music. I started a band with some friends, and we needed a logo for our band. We drew some stuff, but we didn’t have a way to do anything like silk screen. So, I came up with the idea of using a stencil and spray painting clothes. So that’s exactly how it started. And then friends would ask me to do it for them, for their jackets. I kinda became the popular guy in the neighborhood for it. I didn’t get paid much, or even paid. But I actually had no idea there was a stencil world out there.
Mandy: So you used to use sewing needles?
Jorge: Yep! I would just grab the needle and start cutting the paper. I would put electrical tape around it to protect my fingers.
Mandy: When did you first notice you were interested in art, then?
Jorge: Probably about five years ago. Before that, it would be about every six months or so. My first stencils, I did when I was about eighteen or nineteen, but then I stopped for a long time. But when I saw people were doing stencils, I thought, “Wait a minute, I can do that.”
Mandy: Do you have any inspiration that you draw primarily from?
Jorge: I like this question a lot, actually. As I said, when I started doing this, I had no idea that other people were doing this. I didn’t know what it was called or anything. I just started cutting and spray painting. When I found out, of course, there were people that I really really admired. And one of the ones I really liked is C215. The other guy is named Sneak. So those two are probably the ones I really drew from, my inspiration.
Mandy: I noticed a lot of your art is political in nature. Tell us about what is behind that.
Jorge: First I started in music. Punk rock. Back then, punk rock was really political. So all the lyrics, everything in the songs, you could use it for real life. Now, everyone plays for fun, or they might sing political songs, but they spend so much time on facebook. Back then, everything was just more involved in your real life. So the art would go hand-in-hand. We needed it for fliers for protests or shows, and so I started doing the art for all those. And that’s why I started following that path. So I would mix my art with whatever we were doing with the band. Then it expanded to let me do a little bit of everything.
Mandy: What is your biggest struggle as an artist?
Jorge: My biggest obstacle right now is technology. It’s making things so much easier for people. If somebody wants a piece of art, instead of buying it, they can just print a nice quality print of it, and put it on their walls. People that aren’t even artists can print stuff and repaint it over on their walls. And I think that’s the biggest obstacle right now, because it means it’s so under-appreciated. Sometimes I’ll be working on a piece for like, two or three weeks, and then I go and see somebody who printed something like it in a few seconds. I guess another one would be that I live in a small town, where street art is not really appreciated. It’s hard for me. Every piece I make will take two or three years to sell. And I don’t care much about selling, but getting them out there is hard.
Mandy: How about the people in your life? What are their feelings towards your art?
Jorge: I’m a very lucky person. The most important people in my life support me, so much. I haven’t been working a different job in a few months, and if I struggle, they help me out. Sometimes I feel like I need to give up, but it’s them. They keep me going. Especially my wife. She’s the one taking all the trash out. I consider myself really lucky.
Mandy: Do you like to collaborate?
Jorge: I love to collaborate. I just don’t like to ask for it. I like it to be in the moment. When it happens, it happens. To me, it’s like asking someone to be your friend.
Mandy: I know you said a bit about how street art is under-appreciated here. What about the art scene here?
Jorge: I think it’s always been good. When it’s considered graffiti, a lot of people just see it as a bad influence, but when it’s art, they understand it. I love graffiti, I consider it art. I just think the town is so small that we don’t get that exposure, where people want you to paint a whole building with street art. I think art in general in Salt Lake is great. To me, it’s kind of weird that you can go into an art gallery and find really great artists that sell their stuff for a decent price, and then you go to other places like Park City, and find stuff that’s similar for thousands and thousands of dollars. And if you like art, how can you tell? To me, art is really great. I just don’t understand that.
Mandy: So do you have any work around the city?
Jorge: I have always done small things. I don’t have any murals or anything. Most of my pieces are done on recycled materials, and then they’re left on the street. I don’t know what happens to them after I leave. So hopefully people are taking them and starting to figure out that there is someone dropping art around the city. I think it’s better to leave something they like and can take, and do whatever they want with it, than to spend half an hour or an hour on the street to have it wiped out by the city in minutes. I think that’s the real vandalism. You know those gray spots on the walls? I think they look horrible. And I have stuff at the Urban Art Gallery, too.
Kita: What goes into creation for you?
Jorge: It really changes, from time to time, depending on what’s going on, in the whole world. When there is something that is bothering me and I feel it needs to be told, this is my way of expressing it. Everyone has their own way to express. Some people just scream and scream, some people get out in the street and protest, and some people just whine about it, and for me, it’s just a way to release that nonconformity. One thing I can say is that I really concentrate on is painting a lot of women. I have always thought and said that I think that women are way stronger than men. And you can see it everywhere. Every country where you have a revolution or somebody rising, it’s always a woman who starts rising, and then the men start following. So for me, showing this in my art is a statement.
Kita: How would you go about making a piece of art on a technical side?
Jorge: I like to be as original as possible. And I take pictures of everything I want to turn into a stencil. I started taking my own pictures, making collages and the like. When I’m done with the image, I would just print it, raw, as it is. I don’t know how to use photoshop, I never have, maybe I’ll learn one day. But as I print the image, I start editing the image with sharpies or pencils, and that’s the longest process for me. It takes one to three weeks, depending on how many layers. Once I have the image done, I put it on top of different materials. It can be paper, or mylar, or cardboard, or recycled photographic film. I love using recycled materials, because you’re giving life to something that is already garbage. So then I cut all the layers, and then I spray paint each layer. So that’s pretty much the step-by-step breakdown.
Check out more of Jorge’s art at:
facebook.com/stenciljam
stenciljam.wordpress.com
September 28 at 8 pm, Burt’s Tiki Lounge: Jorge’s band All Systems Fail with Maimed for Life
Have anyone else you’d like us to chat with? Suggestions are taken in the comments below.
Heather Gardner
This week, I was lucky enough to sit down for a chat with Heather Gardner, who has quickly become a SLC favorite for burlesque, belly dance, and all around entertainment. With her pretty face and quiet voice, one might mistake her for being demure. I learned that this is a woman with a passion, not just for her art, but to master her own self and skills.
As one of the up-and-coming stars of Salt Lake City, Heather has found herself performing with several top notch groups in a wide variety of events. Her star shows no sign of dimming anytime soon. Often spotted at Juana Ghani events or practicing silks in the park, she has spent the last few years learning everything tossed her way. It's more than paid off.
Still, Heather is a kind soul, with a gracious and smiling demeanor. She's been not only a talented artist, but a happy addition into an arts community that has embraced her fully. Keep your eyes peeled, Utahns. She's taking over!
Kita: So, what kind of artist are you?
Heather: Oh, that's a hard question to answer, because I do so many things. Well, I do burlesque, of course, and belly dance. I'm learning aerial arts right now, so probably my main focus right now. I'm trying to get good at that, but it's really challenging. It takes a lot of strength. But I like that. I'm also taking modern dance, and I took ballet in college, so I'm trying to incorporate that into everything I do. I'm also a musician. My band hasn't played very much lately, but I still like to sing and play the guitar. It just has to take a backseat right now.
Kita: How did you get into dancing?
Heather: Well, I started with belly dancing. That was the first dance I ever did. I started with my mom, and it was in, I think, 2002, so I was about twenty-three. I always wanted to take it. I think I saw a belly dancing segment on some TV show once, and thought, "Oh, I want to do that!" So, I made up my mind that I wanted to try it, and I wanted someone to go with me, so my mom went with me. We danced together for about five or six years, and I took from a lot of different people. I think the first one I ever took was in a community education class in West Jordan or somewhere around there, and my teacher was Ravonda. We took lessons from her that summer, and then we started taking lessons from Thia. So I was there for quite a while, and then I stopped taking lessons from her and started learning from a girl named Melissa Walker. I took lessons from Lara Zorn, and Trisha McBride. Then I started doing my own thing.
Kita: How about music?
Heather: Well, my family is a very musical family. My brother and I learned piano when we were very little. He was always better than I was, and I kind of quit when I was eight years old. My mom wanted everyone in our family to learn an instrument, and so that's when I decided I wanted to play the flute. So that's when I really wanted to do music. I used to go to a different elementary school to take classes, and then I did it throughout middle school and a few years in high school. When I was in the ninth or tenth grade, I decided I wanted to play the guitar. So I got myself a guitar, using all the money I had from the summer job at the time. I was a custodian for a middle school. I kind of taught myself how to play, and started writing songs. It just kind of happened that way and I've been playing ever since.
Kita: Do you write a lot of your own stuff then?
Heather: I do write some music, yeah. I've been writing songs since I was about fifteen. They've changed throughout the years, and a lot of them, I don't even want to think about anymore. But I do like to write, and play other peoples music as well.
Kita: Do you find yourself using this to connect to the arts community in Salt Lake?
Heather: A little bit. I was in a Celtic band. I kind of still am. A member of our band passed away, so it would have to be a different band if we were to bring it up again, but we did perform quite a bit. It was great to connect with different bands and other artists that way. I really enjoyed that. I enjoy just meeting random people who I can play music with. I enjoy playing bluegrass music a lot, since it's a great way to play music for that. A lot of people know the same songs through it.
Kita: Would you say with your experience as a dancer and musician, are the two communities really different?
Heather: Yes. I would say they are. They are similar in some ways. But it's different just in the mediums themselves.
Kita: When you first started dancing, what were your goals?
Heather: My goals were just to be able to learn how to do it. It was new for me. I never really wanted to dance when I was younger. I mean, I did, but I was scared to. I never thought I would be able to do it. When I started belly dancing, I fell in love with it. It was amazing. I learned that my body could learn movement, I just had to try hard and keep working at it. So really, that was my main goal. I never really thought about performing, but I guess after that first year I started thinking about it. Then I had another goal of being a good performer. So those were really my two goals.
Kita: How about now?
Heather: They're pretty much the same, depending on what I'm doing. They've just deepened. I mostly just want to get better, and new things that I want to master. I think they've mostly stayed the same.
Kita: What about music? What were your goals there?
Heather: Just to be able to play. And to be in a band. I've always wanted to play guitar and sing in a band. And that happened! So that was an amazing experience for me. I wouldn't change it for anything. I would love to play in a band again, and continue playing in the band I'm in if it's possible.
Kita: How do music and dance complement each other? Has learning one helped with the other?
Heather: Oh, I think so. I think just being a musician helps you understand music, and being able to create music is really special. It connects you to music on a primal level, and that's kind of moved over into dance.
Kita: So how about your different styles of dance? Burlesque, belly dance, and aerial are all pretty different. Do you find they blend well?
Heather: I think they do. Doing burlesque, you steal a lot of movements from other dance forms, unless you'd like to have a number where you don't do a lot of dancing in. There are those in burlesque that aren't just dance-centric. I like to pull from the dance styles that I've learned. I use it for inspiration, or I'll use certain moves. I do find they go in and out of each other a lot. Modern has helped because it really strengthens your core.
Kita: How is performing? Do you get anxious?
Heather: I do! I used to be really bad with my stage fright. I still get it, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be. It's more of an excitement or anticipation than feeling like you'd want to die. I still get a little bit excited and nervous.
Kita: What have your other struggles been?
Heather: I've had a lot of technical struggles. It seems I've had a lot of problems with music and things not playing right for me. That's a real challenge, because you don't expect it, and then you have to just wing it and do the best you can do. So that's happened. Other than that, it's been coming up with original and fun choreography that other people will find artful and enjoyable.
Kita: So you mostly do your own choreography?
Heather: Yes! I do a lot of freestyling, too. I do like to have a set based choreography, especially if I'm dancing with my students or if there's a song that I really want to get through and convey an idea about. It can be a struggle, but I enjoy letting things flow naturally, and then picking an idea and running with it.
Kita: So do you prefer working with groups or is it really mostly about your solo stuff?
Heather: I like both sides! It's hard to say. I love being a soloist, but I love performing with a group too. I really enjoy being a part of that bigger picture. I enjoy dancing, synchronized with other ladies, and the communal aspect of it. It's like a sisterhood. I love that a lot. But I really like doing solos too, because it really lets your own personality shine through. You can really say, "This is my own medium, this is what I came up with."
Kita: How about when you're doing other peoples choreography? Some dancers I've talked to say they feel almost like robots just going through the motions. How easily do you tap into other peoples viewpoints?
Heather: I love doing other peoples choreography, actually. It's something that I find a challenge sometimes, especially if it's something I'm not technically used to. But I love to master it. I really like trying to match the style they're going for, and trying to capture the mood they're trying to give.
Kita: How well does the art you do harmonize with your day to day job?
Heather: I don't think it's hard. I just barely got my job, a few weeks ago. I'm a student at the university in Ogden, so I work at the library archives, and I'm a scanner. So I get to scan in all these old pictures, and I think it's fun and enjoyable. I've always liked photography, and I get to listen to music while I do it. So even if my mind wanders, I can be thinking of choreography or how I want to play with a song. I think it's a good job for me to have right now.
Kita: What's your favorite aspect of either music or dance?
Heather: I love feeling victorious after I've mastered something. Like, when I'm doing aerial dance, there's a really hard move that took me a long time, and it was always the hardest move for me when I started learning. And then when you get that, it's such an amazing feeling, and you have such respect for yourself and admiration. You feel like, "I can do this!" And then also performing, there's something amazing about it. Being able to make people happy, and bringing a little bit of magic to their lives.
Kita: And least favorite?
Heather: Probably when I mess up. You know, when things don't go the way you want them to, that can be hard. But it's a good learning experience, so I don't feel like it doesn't have any value.
Kita: Where do you find inspiration?
Heather: I find a lot of inspiration in the lyrics of songs. Sometimes, they just speak to you, and you really connect with the message it's sending and the emotions that go along with those things. So I feed off a lot of feelings.
Kita: When you first started with this whole crazy adventure, is this where you saw yourself going?
Heather: Not at all. I don't really know what I expected to be doing, but there's so many different things I'm doing now. I think I just expected that I would be performing and liking it, but I never saw myself branching off into all these different areas. I've always had it in my head that I would be performing something, whether it's songwriting, or music, or dance.
Kita: You've kind of become a local celebrity. Do you ever have strange experiences with that?
Heather: I do! I've had people recognize me in bars, that I've never met but they're my Facebook friend or something. It's really weird when that happens, I'm never sure how to respond. Other than that, it just seems that all the circles I know are connected. I always run into somebody that I know. Everyone I know knows everyone else with all these different connections so that's kind of cool. So sometimes it's pretty cool, and sometimes it's kind of weird. You feel like you're being stalked or something! But it's cool.
Kita: How do the people in your life react to all of this?
Heather: I think they appreciate it for what it is. My family loves to come see me perform and the different styles that I do. They like to support me whenever they can, and my husband likes to come whenever he can.
Kita: Do you find that helpful, or do you really prefer to perform for strangers?
Heather: Oh so helpful! I like having people I know in the audience. It's a bit of moral support. There's also something freeing about performing for people you don't know. There's less expectations and you don't have to worry about whether they liked it or not too much.
Kita: In the belly dance world, the debate over being sexy is pretty strong, but burlesque is obviously meant to be sexy. Did your feelings on that and on what you're willing to do with that change along the way?
Heather: I think so. I think the more I experience different forms of art, I stopped confining myself. I don't like confining myself, or setting any artistic boundaries. If you have something and it's going to work, then you just go for it. And people will hate it or love it and that's going to be the case no matter what you do. So my ideas about what my performances should be and how I should convey them have changed over time and over the years. But I think that always changes.
Kita: People have a lot of different opinions on dance with body image. Some people think it helps, others think just the opposite. Where do you fall on that spectrum?
Heather: It really helped me with how I view my body and gave me such respect for it, so my opinion is that it definitely helps. It promotes healthy self image. When you can move your own body and see it moving in ways you never thought you'd be able to, I think it helps in so many ways. Just getting out there and dancing is healthy.
Have anyone you'd like us to chat with? Suggestions are taken in the comments below.
Mike Sheffield
Mike Sheffield, a long-time resident of Salt Lake City, is a man of many talents. A pianist, singer/song writer, novelist, and sometimes photographer, his latest interest is in writing poetry. Sheffield serves as keyboardist and backup vocalist for local band Smokin’ Id, and works as a psychologist. He and his wife Darby are coming up on their one-year wedding anniversary.
While Mike’s roots were in classical piano, he began picking out popular songs playing on the radio through the boom box in his bedroom when he was in the 8th grade. He soon taught himself to play over 200 songs, and he credits this gradual development of the knowledge of song structure as a basis for which he learned to write his own music. Since then, he’s developed by leaps and bounds as a songwriter, but the man just can’t settle on being good at one thing. He’s always had a deep need to create, whether it is pleasing to the ear, eyes, or soul.
Your wings are a whir
delicate engines
transporting you
forward backward sideways around
and into stillness.
You levitate
before a purple beauty, drink
what the gods have offered
Kita: What type of artist are you?
Mike: Well, I do a lot of things. I grew up playing piano, so I’ve been doing that all my life. I started writing songs in high school. And I’m a writer, poet, and singer. Those things kind of developed later. I never envisioned myself to be a singer, though, until a few years ago. And I did photography too, although I didn’t study it formally. A lot of these things I just picked up on my own.
Kita: Did you start out with classical piano?
Mike: Yes, my mom was actually a piano teacher, so she started giving me lessons when I was four years old. Then when I was in the eighth grade, my parents wanted me to take lessons from this woman who was a professional music teacher, and she was very good. She had taught at the Leningrad Conservatory, and then immigrated. She had guest soloed with the Minnesota Orchestra, so she was top notch, and also very demanding. I didn’t like it, I felt too much pressure. Finally, at the end of the year, my parents let me quit. That was pretty much the last time I played classical. I started thinking, “You know, it would be great if I could just play stuff on the radio.” So I would just try to play along, and I would record songs on a tape recorder, and I would try to pick out the bass line, and really learn those songs. And within a few years, I had learned a couple hundred songs. I never knew the names of the chords. I didn’t have music theory, but I discovered right away that I had a really good ear. In the process of doing that, I learned the structure of songs. I couldn’t articulate how to structure a song, but I just knew it. I tried for years to write a song, and I just couldn’t do it. And then one day, I sat down at the piano, and this song popped out. I wrote it in about half an hour.
Kita: At what point did you start focusing on this for yourself and not your parents?
Mike: In the eighth grade, for sure. Because then playing got to be really fun. I took refuge in music. I was not happy that year. I was pretty depressed. I was very shy, and I kind of went into my own world, and music was a big part of that. It might have limited my social development, but it also saved my life in a lot of ways. My parents were supportive. They always wanted me to be involved in music. They didn’t like pop or rock music at all, but they liked my piano playing.
Kita: Since it was them who really got you into this, did all your siblings play as well?
Mike: Pretty much. She [my mom] tried to teach everyone piano. A couple of them didn’t stick with it. I’m the oldest of eight, and I think about three of them didn’t stick with it.
Kita: So, when you hit that point of writing your own stuff, what became your biggest goals at that point?
Mike: I really wanted to be a songwriter. I didn’t ever anticipate being the greatest piano player, and I didn’t practice enough to be a great piano player. I did what was fun for me, and I wanted to be good enough that I could play in a band. But the thing I really wanted to do was write songs. So I always looked for opportunities to write songs to get other people to sing and find some way to record. I thought about having a career in music for quite a while. I have my undergraduate in psychology, and I started grad school. I went to Northwestern for a year, for their PhD program, and then I didn’t like it. I took a leave of absence from that program with a pretty solid idea that I might not go back. I worked for a year, and thought very seriously for a few months about just giving up psychology and just being a songwriter. And then, I realized that I did like psychology and that it was more practical, so I went back into grad school.
Kita: Do you feel that since that point, have you reached any significant goal steps along the way?
Mike: Not at all to the degree that I would like. I haven’t gotten a song well recorded, and I’d really like to do that. I don’t necessarily want to be a performer, although I started going after it a few years ago. There are some things about performing that I really like, and I wanted to take that seriously. But for me, the greatest joy is creating. I’m not satisfied with just creating, and I want to get it into a form where other people are hearing it, whether I’m singing it or someone else is. And I haven’t got that yet. People hear the songs and they like them and I get positive feedback, and that’s great. But I also want something more.
Kita: What has been the biggest struggle you’ve had to deal with?
Mike: Being able to make that transition, and wondering if I can get to that place where I’m making money. I would be really happy if I could just do my creative projects, full time. So how you make that transition…I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. I was ready to go sell my house and live out of my truck in the wilderness so I’d have more time to write. And I decided that six weeks before the economy tanked back in 2008, and by the time I got my house on the market, it was too late. And then I got cancer, right after that, and that changed everything. Now I’m really glad I still have the house. I really needed it, it turns out. So I’m happy with my life. I’m still struggling to figure out how to carve out enough time to do the projects that I want to do. And the other big struggle is that there are a lot of things that I like to do, and I would probably have gotten farther if I had just focused on one thing. But I don’t’ regret trying all the things that I have.
Two years ago, I took a class on creative nonfiction, and started working on a memoir. So now I’m working on a poetry book and a memoir and all these songs. I’m still hopeful that someday, I am going to be able to do more with all of the things that I’m doing.
Kita: You’ve really become a jack-of-all-trades.
Mike: Yes! There are ways in which all of those things come together. For example, poetry was one of those things that I had never really considered. And then one day, I was out watching a hummingbird and I started writing a poem. I’d only written a few poems in my life, and by this point, I was in my forties. I got to the end of the poem, and I was surprised by this line. It was, “For you I would be a poet.” It just jumped out at me! There was something deep inside that was evoked by this experience and the poet inside just woke up. I wrote sixty-five poems over the next year and a half. That’s kind of how my artistic path has been; here, there, and everywhere. The important thing has been to find out that to be happy, I have to be doing something creative. There’s like, this fire in me that has to come out in some form or another.
Kita: Are there more things you still want to try?
Mike: If I had the time, I would like to learn to play the guitar, and I’d like to drum, and learn different styles. I’m working on some ideas on how to bring all these things together, actually.
Kita: Would you say that your art and other business have harmonized well?
Mike: It’s felt more clashing. Although, my training as a psychologist and my experience as a psychologist has influenced my writing, for sure. Because I write a lot about inner landscapes. I studied a lot about that, and that’s what drew me to psychology. And that’s what’s really compelling, I think. What I’ve been doing for the past ten years is psychological testing. It’s a dry, boring kind of writing. So I’ve really felt this strong clash the last several years. But it has also given me the opportunity to live the kind of life that I want. You have to value all those things. And maybe that tension is really important. Somebody said, I think it was Tennessee Williams, “The worst thing that can happen to an artist is success.”
Kita: Do you prefer to work alone or is collaboration more your thing?
Mike: I’ve done both. It’s been interesting to try and collaborate with other people. I think it’s great to encounter other ways of doing things. But I still have had more enjoyment from doing my own thing.
Kita: What or who would you say are your biggest influences?
Mike: In poetry, it’s been Rilke and Mary Oliver. William Stafford. Musically, I grew up playing a lot of Billy Joel. And the blues, I love the blues. I think that musically, I’ve been influenced by a lot of different people so much that it’s probably hard to name any of them. I tried to force myself to write in different styles so I didn’t get stuck in one thing. I even tried to write country songs, which I was never very good at.
Kita: Where would you say you feel most inspired?
Mike: I love to write outdoors, actually. Nature is my biggest inspiration, by far. Especially with the poetry, but even before that with the music. It is just part of who I am, as an artist, and as a person, and I feel this deep connection with the earth. Travel is often very helpful. When I go on a trip and then come back, a song would just pop out. I love the way that Darell Scott, a great songwriter, described it. He just waited until a song came knocking, and then he tried to honor it by letting it out.
Kita: What have been your biggest growth points or epiphanies?
Mike: When I was a senior in high school, there was this guy who came to town. I grew up Mormon, so this was this Mormon guy who was traveling around and doing his show that he had put together. My dad volunteered to drive him around when he came to town, and he brought him over to dinner at our house. My dad never said this, but I’m pretty sure that he did that in order for me to meet this guy. His name was Lynn Bryson. He [my dad] started talking about how I was a songwriter. So we finish dinner and go into the living room, and I play a couple of songs. Lynn said, “Well, I travel all over the country. I’ve heard lots of musicians and writers in the church, and if I had to bet, I would say you are the one who’s going to write the next great church musical.” I laugh about it now, because that’s so far from what I would do at this point in my life, but at that point, it was just, “Wow, he sees that in me!” It was like a bolt of electricity went through me. I just knew that I would do something important in music one day. That was one. I was in a bodywork session with a good friend of mine. I had the sensation of paralysis that started in my head and went down through my body, and it was terrifying. Pretty soon, I just started unwinding, and all these bizarre sounds were coming out of me. I don’t even understand what it was. In the midst of that, it was similar to hearing a voice. It was this sense in my belly. And that feeling took shape into words that were, “You need to sing.” And I was completely against it. I mean anything but that. But I couldn’t deny that. And I knew I needed to sing. That’s why I started taking voice lessons. For some reason that was where my anxiety and fear about that was the strongest. So I had to do the scariest thing. That was a lot of growth.
I want to be bird and flower
drinker and drunk
the opening and opened.
If I cannot be you
I will be my longing.
To contact Mike, call at 8015121352, or email shef_ips@yahoo.com.
Have anyone else you'd like us to chat with? Suggestions are taken in the comments below.
Steveie Busch
Nestor Jimenez
Darby Gordon
Dianne Gulezian
Jhonny K
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HOME > NEWSROOM > ARTICLES > FREEDOM TODAY ARTICLES > State Department Announces ‘Countries of Particular Concern’
State Department Announces ‘Countries of Particular Concern’
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week announced that, in accordance with the International Religious Freedom Act, he had placed several countries on a “Countries of Particular Concern” (CPC) list for “systematic, ongoing, [and] egregious violations of religious freedom.” Those nations so designated included Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. Those on this list, and a similar “entities” list that included groups like ISIS and Boko Haram, could face sanctions for their behavior.
“Safeguarding religious freedom is vital to ensuring peace, stability, and prosperity,” Pompeo said. “These designations are aimed at improving the lives of individuals and the broader success of their societies.”
A second tier “Special Watch List” included Comoros, Russia, and Uzbekistan. This was an upgrade for Uzbekistan off of the CPC list, where it has been since 2006, and a downgrade for Russia. When asked in a news conference about the significance of Russia’s addition, U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback cited that country’s concerning trajectory, particularly after its anti-missionary law passed in 2016.
“They really have targeted and stepped up their oppression,” the ambassador declared.
The soundness of China’s presence on the CPC list was underscored again just days ago when Chinese authorities raided the Early Rain Covenant Church, a large Protestant church in the city of Chengdu in southwest China, and arrested Pastor Wang Yi and more than a hundred other church members. Brownback highlighted this new outrage as well as the ongoing persecution of Uighur Muslims and other religious minorities.
“China isn’t backing away from the religious persecution; it seems to be expanding,” said Brownback. “This is obviously very troubling to the administration.”
Regarding the elevation of Pakistan to the CPC list, Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), a congressional champion for human rights globally, welcomed the move. He declared, “This Administration has had the courage to hold Pakistan accountable for Pakistan’s persistent and systemic failures to protect the civil and human rights of religious minorities.” He added that this move “gives hope and voice to suffering” religious minorities in that country.
In another move welcomed by advocates of international religious liberty, President Trump this week signed into law a bill intended to aid victims of genocide in the Middle East. The President said, “This bill continues my administration’s efforts to direct U.S. assistance toward persecuted communities, including through faith-based programs. It also allows the government agencies to assist a range of entities in investigating and prosecuting ISIS’s despicable acts. And they are very despicable indeed.”
He declared, “Today, we honor the memory of all those killed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and we renew our sacred commitment to religious freedom.”
A Helsinki Commission hearing featuring Ambassador Brownback after the CPC announcement is viewable here.
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True Beelievers: Hives on prairie land produce research opportunities
Khye Hill is decked out in white coveralls and clutching a metal container, from which white smoke drifts out of the spout.
The junior ecology major is about to get up close and personal with a bee hive. The smoker is used by beekeepers to help calm the members of the colony – who might otherwise be a tad upset that a crowd of people has arrived to inspect their living conditions.
“Never before in my life,” Hill says with a laugh when asked how many times he’s done this.
The addition of three hives to the 40 acres of tall grass prairie land at Missouri Southern is definitely something to buzz about. Dr. Katie Kilmer, assistant professor of biology and environmental health, says the idea came about during a classroom discussion.
“I teach a Principles of Biology class which goes into animal and plant diversity,” she says. “We were talking about the importance of bees as pollinators and how honeybee populations are crashing all over the country and world. People are being encouraged to take up beekeeping on a small scale rather than just as a commercial enterprise.
“One of my students asked if we had beehives on campus and I said I’d look into it and see.”
The answer was no, there weren’t any hives on campus, but she quickly discovered there was support for the idea.
“The Joplin Beekeepers Association’s response was more enthusiastic than I could have imagined,” says Kilmer.
The association donated three hives that MSSU will use for training purposes. When those hives have grown big enough to reproduce into new hives, they plan to donate more.
“Eventually we may have up to eight hives on the prairie,” says Kilmer.
The typical hive can grow big enough to support 40,000 to 50,000 bees, says Phil McGowan, a member of the local association. A really large hive can reach 60,000.
“We’re offering Missouri Southern some instruction on what to look for in a hive,” he says.
On this particular spring afternoon, McGowan says they’ll be looking to confirm that the queen bee has started laying eggs. Hill’s smoker will help to ensure the worker bees stay relatively calm during the process.
“The queen has probably been laying eggs for the last several weeks,” McGowan says. “They’re getting ready for the spring build up.”
Should one wonder if there’s going to be a nice supply of honey created from the hives, the answer is yes.
“We do have a long-term goal of being able to collect and market the honey, with proceeds being used to fund student research at Missouri Southern,” says Kilmer. “But right now, our focus is on getting our hives established and learning how to care for and manage the bees.”
At the moment, the primary emphasis is on the undergraduate research opportunities presented by the hives.
“The main goal for my research project is to gather information to determine the type of pollen the bees in this area are using,” says Hill. “We can help people determine what type of native plant species can be introduced in their area to attract bees.”
Another long-term goal is to establish a beekeeping club on campus.
“We want MSSU to become a more bee-friendly campus,” says Kilmer. “There are certifications available from different organizations. And forming a club on campus could give students – even those outside of the sciences – an outlet to look into in order to explore beekeeping.”
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The Vindicated Being Right Isn't Always Easy
Bedford & Bowery
A Mad Doctor and a 19th-Century Medical Mystery We’re Still Learning From Today
By Steven Poole
Photo: Markus Moellenberg/Getty Images
Some ideas have to be revived more than once in order to stick, even when the way they work has become well-understood. In this regard, there may be no sadder or more instructive case than that of the young Austrian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who was appointed deputy head of obstetrics in Vienna’s General Hospital in 1846.
The hospital had two maternity clinics, which had markedly different death rates. In the first, about 10 percent of mothers died from puerperal fever, two and a half times as many as in the second. Women entering the hospital to give birth begged to be assigned to the second clinic because the first had such a horrific reputation; some even deliberately gave birth in the street and then pretended they had done so on the way to the hospital. Ignaz Semmelweis decided to find out why so many women in the first clinic were dying. He compared every difference between the clinics he could think of. He considered the equipment, the furnishings, overcrowding, the climate, even the religious practices of the staff. Nothing seemed like a promising culprit.
Then another doctor at the hospital, a friend of Semmelweis’s, died in 1847. He had been accidentally cut by a student’s scalpel while they were performing a postmortem examination. The autopsy of this unfortunate doctor showed pathologies resembling those in women who had died of fever in the first clinic. The first clinic was also a teaching clinic for medical students, while the second taught only midwives. Semmelweis made the great logical leap: Medical students were arriving in the first clinic to treat expectant mothers right after they had been cutting open bodies downstairs. They must, he reasoned, be carrying invisible “cadaverous particles” on their hands that then infected the mothers. At once, he ordered that after working with corpses, the students should wash their hands in chlorinated lime solution, rather than the normal soap and water. Chlorinated lime was known as a bleaching agent that cleaned thoroughly. Semmelweis found it the most effective way to get rid of the putrid smell of dead tissue; so, he reasoned, it might be destroying the cadaverous particles along with the smell. (As we would now say, it was a disinfectant.) The maternal death rate in the first clinic immediately dropped by 90 percent. A few months later, it was closer to zero.
Ignaz Semmelweis in happier times.
Semmelweis began to spread this message as widely as he could. And what did he get for his efforts? Hostility and ridicule. Europe’s greatest obstetricians called his view unscientific, lacking in evidence, and unsupported by any credible theory. No one knew why hand-washing prevented infection, so it was all too easy to decide that it didn’t. What was worse, Semmelweis’s idea implied that it was doctors themselves who were (unwittingly) killing their patients. Semmelweis became increasingly frustrated and angry, writing letters accusing his opponents of being murderers. Even his wife thought he was going mad. In 1865, at the age of 47, he was forcibly committed to an asylum. He died there two weeks later, most likely from an infection that took hold after he was beaten by guards while he was in a straightjacket. His vindication would come only posthumously, when Louis Pasteur proposed the germ theory of disease years later. Semmelweis had been basically right all along: His “cadaverous particles” were bacteria breeding in the dead bodies used for student autopsies.
Astonishingly, this message has had to be revived again even within the last decade. One of the pioneers of the new movement of “evidence-based medicine” is the pediatrician Don Berwick, who co-founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston. Berwick noticed that thousands of intensive-care patients in American hospitals were dying every year from infections after having catheters inserted in their chests. In 2004, he found an obscure study suggesting that improved hygiene by hospital staff — more frequent and systematic hand-washing, combined with other practices such as using antiseptic wipes on patients — could cut the risk of such infections by more than 90 percent. Berwick announced loudly that 25,000 lives a year could be saved if these reforms were immediately adopted, and still he met with resistance and apathy: The protocols were adopted slowly and piecemeal rather than — as logic, economics, and simple humanity would seem to demand — overnight. But where they were adopted, the results were dramatic. In those American hospitals that signed up to his challenge and adopted his reforms, it was estimated that more than 100,000 patient deaths were prevented within 18 months.
But too many doctors, in the 2000s as in the 1840s, continued to act like members of a lofty priesthood, offended by the suggestion that they were not already working optimally. The obstetricians who ridiculed Semmelweis’s hand-washing complained that it wasn’t supported by any reliable theory. They were correct: It wasn’t. It was a black box, a concept from engineering that describes a mechanism we can’t see. With a black box, all we can see are the inputs and outputs, and we have to guess about what’s going on inside. And ideas can be like that, too. No one understood how hand-washing could reduce infection. What no one knew was that the right theory — transmission of disease by bacteria — was just around the corner.
Black boxes turn out to be common in the history of discovery. Things may be found to work well as medicines long before the reason they work is explained by molecular biology. The first modern steam engines were cobbled together by mechanics and inventors; a thorough scientific explanation of why they worked had to wait a century until the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics. Until then, they, too, were black boxes. Given what we have seen, it would be surprising if there were not other old, discarded ideas that are right even though we don’t understand how they could be. Just because we don’t know how something works doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
Steven Poole’s Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas, published by Scribner, hits book stores this week.
the vindicated
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Last modified 1414 days ago (Sept. 3, 2015)
Peabody native 'adopts' 700 Kansas towns
By DAVID COLBURN
What started five years ago as a simple gesture by Peabody native Steve Meirowsky to enhance the town’s Wikipedia entry has grown into a passion for ensuring all Kansas towns are on the cyber map. Literally.
“The most recent thing I did was to go through a full edit, editing the full maps,” Meirowsky said. “I went through and added it to all the cities in Kansas, which was about 700.”
Almost 26 million registered “Wikipedians” have contributed articles and edits to the English edition of the popular online encyclopedia since its debut in 2001. Meirowsky is among the more prolific editors, ranking 1,059th among active contributors with more than 50,000 edits to his credit.
Meirowsky, a 1979 Peabody High School graduate, has written and contributed to articles about microcontrollers, his area of computing expertise, but he cut his Wikipedia teeth on articles about towns in Marion County, starting with Peabody.
“I kept going back to the Peabody article, and there was nothing there,” he said. “One day I said, ‘I’m going to learn this.’”
He learned not only how to add and edit information, but also how to create new entries — Aulne, Antelope, Canada, and Eastshore entered the Wikipedia universe in 2010, thanks to Meirowsky.
“Once I started doing the Peabody article, I started migrating to other towns in Marion County,” Meirowsky said. “My great-grandmother lived west of Aulne a few miles. My great-great-grandparents homesteaded north of Aulne.”
His interest gradually expanded to encompass the state, with particular focus on smaller communities.
“I kind of care more about the small, tiny towns than the big towns like Kansas City or Wichita,” Meirowsky said. “A lot of small towns don’t have any webpage at all. This is sometimes the only thing online about them.”
A career in computing was a foregone conclusion for Meirowsky, who as a PHS student helped to start the school’s first computer class in 1978. He also won 4-H state and national awards for electric energy projects. He parlayed his expertise in microcontrollers into jobs with numerous companies, including one with Honeywell developing software for the F/A-18 Hornet fighter attack jet.
But Wikipedia has become an avocation, and Meirowsky a historian. Staying true to Wikipedia’s intent to provide verified information, he’s always on the hunt for documentation for what he wants to add.
“With Wikipedia, you’re supposed to give references,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff I want to type in that I know about, but if I can’t find it in a book I can’t put it on.”
To that end, Meirowsky has been collecting whatever books he can find with Marion County history. He also has found an increasing number of sources online.
“Some of the older stuff is really hard to find, but they’re digitizing so many magazines and books,” he said. “Now it’s getting easier. There’s a lot of stuff coming online.”
Meirowsky said he found “drawings in an East Coast newspaper” for Gnadenau, an extinct Krimmer Mennonite village southeast of Hillsboro.
“We’re kind of blessed someone came through the area and did some drawings,” he said. “A lot of places the history is just gone.”
Wikipedia’s collaborative editing process means others make edits to Meirowsky’s work, and he does the same for other articles where he sees improvements can be made. He said his contributions are mostly adding content or clarifying what’s there, while others editors specialize in grammar or spelling.
“I’m an engineer and not many engineers are noted for writing,” Meirowsky said. “I’ve been spending more time on that for the past 20 years to make myself better.”
In addition to editing, Meirowsky monitors between 5,000 and 10,000 Wikipedia entries for new edits. He doesn’t check every edit that is made; trusting other editors who’ve proved reliable cuts down on the work.
The amount of time he devotes to Wikipedia is hard to pin down, Meirowsky said.
“It varies a lot,” he said. “During the winter I spend a lot more time; you can’t go work in the yard. When it’s nicer outside, I like gardening — I grow tomatoes and peppers — and working in the yard.”
Meirowsky said he welcomes people to edit city and school Wikipedia articles for Marion County, particularly with referenced new material.
“I want to expand some of these, but I haven’t gotten back to it,” he said. “Some of those where there isn’t enough information, I haven’t written about.”
Last modified Sept. 3, 2015
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Our Lady of the Wayside – History
Madonna della Strada
When the clergy were looking for a site to develop a new parish at the beginning of the thirties, they came to see Heathfield a large house with out-buildings and orchards which occupied the present site of Our Lady of the Wayside. As yet no name had been decided for the new parish by the Archbishop. The clergy noted that the lady who owned the house had on her wall a small copy of the picture of the Madonna della Strada (Our Lady of the Wayside) venerated in the church of the Gesù in Rome. The lady was initially reluctant to sell the property but finally agreed and it was decided by the Archbishop of the time, Archbishop Williams, that the new parish should be dedicated to Our Lady of the Wayside.
The church of the Gesù in the centre of Rome near Piazza Venezia occupies the site that St Ignatius chose for the centre of his operations after founding of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in 1540. Pope Paul III who lived in Palazzo Venezia immediately behind the present church, gave the first Jesuits the small neighbourhood Chapel dedicated to Santa Maria della Strada (Our Lady of the Wayside). Although the chapel was too small for the Jesuits needs, it was perfectly located at a central cross-roads, next to the Pope and his court, close to the city hall, the Campidoglio, and in the middle of a developing neighbourhood where rich and poor, Jews and Christians, the refined and the illiterate lived side by side.
Lack of funds and opposition meant that St Ignatius could not build the large Church he dreamt of for his headquarters.When he died in 1556 he was buried in the sanctuary of Santa Maria della Strada. Twelve years later the construction of the church began and it was consecrated in 1584. The architect Vignola designed the chapel of the Madonna della Strada in the new church to house the image of the Madonna which had stood on the facade of the little church given to St. Ignatius in 1540. The Image painted on the outside wall was carefully removed when the little church was demolished and set into the jewel – like round chapel.
“O Mary our heavenly Mother, may you be the guide of our steps on the often steep and rocky road of life, and when this reaches its end, be for us the gate of heaven and show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus.”
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What the UNRWA funding cut really means
By Naomi Kundera - August 07, 2018
Section: [Main News] [Features]
Tags: [UNRWA] [US foreign policy] [refugees]
“It is important to have an honest and sincere effort to disrupt UNRWA,” Jared Kushner, Trump Middle East aid and son-in-law, wrote in a leaked email to other White House senior officials back in January.
“This [agency] perpetuates a status quo, is corrupt, inefficient and doesn’t help peace.”
Last month, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) - the primary international agency for the aid of Palestinian refugees in the Near East - announced as many as 250 job cuts in the West Bank and Gaza. The heavy job losses are cited to be a consequence from the primary donor source, the United States (US), deducing a promised amount of $365 million for this year’s emergency fund to only $65 million.
UNRWA’s Commissioner-General described this reduction in funding as an “existential threat” to the agency. This statement has deep implications for what this funding cut really means not only for UNRWA, but for the geopolitical region at large.
Redefining refugees
UNRWA was established in 1949 after the Palestinian exodus in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. The purpose of the agency is to provide direct relief and works programs for Palestinian refugees.
This UN agency is unique as it contributes to the welfare of four generations of Palestinian refugees. The descendants of those who fled or were forced to leave their homes in 1948 are eligible to register as refugees, and thus for UNRWA aid.
Today, there are 5.3 million registered Palestinian refugees in the areas of UNRWA operation: the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.
Ahmed*, an UNRWA employee in the Bethlehem office, confessed that there is a lot of sentiment among his colleagues that the recent layoffs are not just about losing money.
“The programs are changing. The management and the style of the work is changing now. So it’s not only financial… it is also a political issue,” Ahmed told Palestine Monitor.
The mentality of the Palestinian people, he explained, is to take responsibility of the refugees. UNRWA gives education and health, food and living security to refugees. But “maybe they want to change it to make it simple. Just a simple value,” rather than actual, physical support. They want to make no difference between a refugee and a citizen.
Cutting funding to UNRWA isn’t just about the money. It’s a strategic move by the US to redefine the Palestinian refugee issue.
Last week, a bill was introduced to the US Congress in an attempt to recognize only 40,000 Palestinian refugees rather than the 5.3 million.
Brought to the table by Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn, the bill is meant to ensure that US money to UNRWA will go to Palestinians directly affected by the 1948 war and not their descendants. "Refugee status is not something that can be handed down from generation to generation," Lamborn stated in defense of the bill.
Ending UNRWA to “end” the refugee issue
“I think exactly that this is a political issue,” Mohammed, another Bethlehem office employee, said more confidently. “They want to stop the refugee issue, by the Americans and Israel… the only way to stop this issue is to stop UNRWA.”
When analyzing the situation in Palestine, three main issues are presented and necessary to solve in order for peace to ensue: Jerusalem, borders, and refugees.
In May of this year, the US graciously “gave” Jerusalem to Israel - at least rhetorically - by moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the self-proclaimed capital.
“The second thing is the refugees. You should change their mind, their outlook of where they will live… they are not living in tents so, they are normal, like the other citizens,” Ahmed explained.
And as for borders, continued settlement expansion and annexation of West Bank land speaks volumes to what Israel considers to be its geographical definition.
“When we are born here, we only see the UNRWA services. But nowadays there is not enough services from UNRWA. So we noticed that the UNRWA will stop after a few years,” Mohammed told Palestine Monitor matter-of-factly. “That means Israeli and American policies will use UNRWA to stop the refugee issue. That’s it. It’s only a political issue.”
In an analysis of the leaked White House emails regarding the UNRWA cuts, Foreign Policy reported many pro-Israelis in the US see UNRWA as an organization that, “artificially kept the refugee issue alive and kindled hopes among the exiled Palestinians that they might someday return home—a possibility Israel flatly rules out.”
The spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Elad Strohmayer, publicly stated that Israel believes UNRWA “needs to pass from the world as it is an organization that advocates politically against Israel and perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem.”
On the ground realities
At the end of the day, more than just UNRWA employees will be affected by these budget cuts.
“We asked the director, 'if you kick us out only, will the problem stop? You will [continue to] give refugees services?,’” Mohammed said.
“He said, 'no,’ because we know it’s not about the services, it’s not money. It’s about policy.”
UNRWA’s emergency fund covered a vast amount of programs, including its Cash for Work and food voucher systems, mobile health clinics and mental health assistance for bedouin communities, and UNRWA schools. All of these programs and its employees will be affected.
Ahmed told Palestine Monitor that the Cash for Work program provided for over 8,000 families, most of which this program is their only source of income. Bedouin communities depend on the mobile clinics for all of their health concerns, and school will reach over 60 children per classroom which will significantly impact students’ learning capabilities.
Hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will lose their jobs as a direct result of the UNRWA budget cuts - all during a time of extreme economic stagnation and high unemployment.
Lead photo: UNRWA center in Dheisha camp, Bethlehem, covered in protest posers. Some read "We are not a slave to UNRWA" and "If UNRWA ends, then let us go back to our occupied land."
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Embracing our liberal democracy
By Chris Lewis - posted Friday, 20 November 2009 Sign Up for free e-mail updates!
I embrace Australia’s political system. While there are some who argue that there is a greater political alternative out there (so-called social democracy), or just simply prefer to bag our political system, we are indeed fortunate to live in one of the freer societies of the world.
In addition to voting at elections and the role played by public debate on specific issues between elections, I celebrate further political expression opportunities created by the Internet and sites like On Line Opinion for both writers and respondents.
Public opinion and debate does count. One has only to view Rudd’s many radio interviews in the immediate days after a Newspoll (December 3, 2009) suggested declining support for Labor because of its approach to Sri Lankan asylum seekers.
But that is the strength of liberalism. We accept the need for extensive debate to force policy elites to take greater account of public opinion, although many may be annoyed by individual policy outcomes.
While democracy is not perfect, it is certainly more desirable than any other political system that curtails freedom of expression or assumes the importance of policy elites.
So I do get annoyed when I read articles that attack democracy. For instance, David Fisher’s On Line Opinion piece (November 5, 2009) noted that democratic US was a danger to world peace - it exported more than US$142 billion worth of weaponry to states around the world since 1992 (half of all arms exports in 2001) - while the development of the EU offered a solution.
Sure, the US has made many policy mistakes. I agree some of the European nations (including Britain) do appear a bit more sophisticated in regards to many policy issue debates and outcomes.
But what did we really expect from the US or any other nation that assumes an international leadership role? Just as many individuals are often flawed due to their shortcomings, self-interest and ongoing mistakes, is it realistic to expect the US to abandon all contradictions to fulfill the idealism of democracy in such a competitive world?
While the EU has demonstrated the possibility of greater co-operation between like-minded democracies after centuries of shared experience, albeit that important national differences still remain, humanity continues its struggle to overcome competition between various political entities struggling for resources and the influence of certain ideas. This is despite much progress that has resulted from economic and ideological developments since the time of the 16th century when 500 independent political units existed within European feudal society alone.
In all likelihood, human progress faces much pain ahead as individual nations make different decisions depending on their perspective and situation. In the hierarchy of nations in terms of influence and wealth, some will rise, some will fall, some will hold their ground, and others will remain poor and chaotic as few resources encourages conflict rather than social cohesion.
So what do we have left for those of us still interested in appeasing both national and international aspirations? Indeed, we have our various national struggles to either support or reject policy change in an ever-changing and interdependent world always searching for ideas which can mediate national differences to encourage co-operation.
Take efforts to address rising greenhouse gas emissions. Contrary to Clive Hamilton ridiculing the capacity of Australia’s parliamentary democracy to address such an issue (Crikey, August 12, 2009), public debate will lead to a compromise that will promote positive measures yet not destroy the national interest given our high reliance upon energy-intensive industries.
Chris Lewis has an interest in all economic, social and environmental issues, but believes that the struggle for the ‘right’ policy mix remains an elusive goal in such a complex and competitive world.
» Australia has sound reasons to support the US against authoritarian China - July 12, 2019
» The IAAF decision to limit female testosterone levels for certain female track events is stupid - May 25, 2018
» Do we really need public funded journalism? - October 19, 2017
» Drug cheating at the 2017 IAAF World Championships: how best to counter this possibility - August 16, 2017
» Justin Gatlin, drug cheat or one of the world’s greatest modern day sprinters? - August 10, 2017
All articles by Chris Lewis
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HRH Duke of Gloucester visits CABI in Wallingford
26 September 2014 – Today, HRH The Duke of Gloucester visited CABI’s head office in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, to learn about the organization’s work solving problems in agriculture and the environment. The Duke was greeted by Vice Lord-Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, John Harwood, and CABI’s Executive Director, Publishing, Andrea Powell. Chairman of South Oxfordshire District Council, Cllr Anne Midwinter, Chair of Crowmarsh Parish Council, John Griffin, the Mayor of Wallingford, Cllr Jane Titchener and the former Mayor of Wallingford, Cllr Bernard Stone, attended the event.
CABI scientists were on hand to show how the organization’s research helps control the spread of non-native invasive species using natural means. Kate Constantine gave an overview of CABI’s research on the biological control of Japanese knotweed, a fast-growing non-native weed that grows through concrete and damages property, using the psyllid, Aphalara itadori. Following extensive research, CABI released these sap-sucking bugs in field trials at various sites across the UK in 2010. The Duke was invited to view the psyllids in action under a microscope.
Sonal Varia introduced CABI’s research on the biological control of Himalayan balsam, one of the UK’s most invasive weeds, which destroys natural habitats. CABI began field trials in August 2014 to control Himalayan balsam using the rust fungus, Puccinia komarovii. She talked about exploratory surveys to better understand the plant, testing of the rust fungus in quarantine to ensure its safety and the recent field trials, the first of their kind in the UK and Europe. Corin Pratt described CABI’s programme to control Azolla, a plant that infests water habitats damaging biodiversity, using weevils.
Mrs Powell talked about CABI’s mission to improve people’s lives worldwide by providing information and applying scientific expertise to solve problems in agriculture and the environment. She explained the principles that underpin Plantwise – a programme conceived and led by CABI to help smallholder farmers in developing countries safeguard their food production. Dr Clare Beverley gave a demonstration of how Plantwise plant clinics operate and how plant doctors help diagnose and treat farmers’ sick plants, in order to help them grow more and lose less of what they produce.
Mrs Powell also showed The Duke CABI’s scientific publishing products, as well as the architectural designs for the new CABI building in Wallingford. “We’re delighted His Royal Highness could visit CABI and see how we take scientific expertise in agriculture and the environment and turn it into action to help people in the UK and across the world.”
For all our latest stories, read our news.
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Sex Work as Legitimate Work
Catherine Bowman, Managing Editor
Sex work has long been a controversial topic; it seems like almost everyone has an opinion on what people should or shouldn’t be doing with their bodies. Sex work, defined as “the provision of sexual services for money or goods,” according to the World Health Organization, has been around for as long as people have been on the planet, even appearing in the Bible.
If Jesus can treat sex workers with dignity and respect, we should be able to do the same. Nuns carry on the tradition today of treating everybody with respect and extending compassion to those marginalized in society. Who are we to judge a person’s decision to use their body to make money?
We shouldn’t–Sex work is legitimate work and should be respected.
For decades women have been fighting for the right to control their own bodies. Being against sex work acknowledges that the government should be able to tell women how to use their bodies.
While some people argue that women should not use their bodies as commodities, much of the advertising industry does just that. By recognizing sex work as legitimate work, we can give women control over their own bodies and control over how they use them. Not to mention using their bodies to make money and support themselves.
Additionally, we can make it safer for everyone involved, especially protecting the sex workers from harm, by instituting reforms such as requiring that birth control be used, ensuring testing for STDs, and providing protection from violence. By recognizing sex work as legitimate work, sex workers will hopefully be given the same benefits as other “legitimate” jobs and will therefore be treated fairly.
If we legalize prostitution, sex work will no longer be dangerous or taboo. Once it is accepted, there would be a lower risk of sex workers being raped or assaulted because they are no longer hiding from law enforcement. They would be integrated into society, making it harder for criminals to prey on them.
So my question is, why not let sex workers and the sex work industry profit off the sex-obsessed masses? It only makes sense.
Clearly, the Catholic Church is against sex work, but primarily because the Church considers sex to be about unity and procreation. The Church does not have an official position on voluntary sex work, but it’s easy to deduce that the church’s position on the dignity of the human body would preclude sex work as a legitimate career choice.
As with any profession, and especially with a profession so thrust back into the corners of society, there are going to be risks and corrupt pockets. There is a large sex-trafficking issue that bleeds into the sex work industry, where boys and girls, men and women, are forced to participate in sex work after being preyed upon by evil people.
But we must combat this problem by bringing attention to it. If we continue to allow the topic of sex work, or even the word “sex” to continue to be so taboo, victims of sex-trafficking will continue to be in the shadows, unable to be helped because no one will talk about their struggle.
Voluntary sex workers, no matter how they came to the industry, are working of their own free will. They’re not sex slaves. They chose this as their profession and they will most likely continue doing it whether or not society accepts them.
If voluntary sex work is normalized and accepted, we can brighten the dark corners of the sex work industry and root out the sex-trafficking rings and help the people forced into sexual labor. We must stop writing voluntary sex workers off to be gross, or beneath us, or too taboo to even think about.
Sex work is legitimate work. It’s time we learn to respect sex workers and stop trampling on them because they chose a career that society deemed as below the standard.
Tags: Presentation, PresentationVoice, prostitution, sex workers
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RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History
Location: The Hague, Netherlands
Photographs: 6,000,000
Website | Online catalogue
The RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History is a global knowledge institute and the central resource for the study of Dutch and Flemish art in the international context. The RKD operates as an independent international academic documentation and knowledge institute, interacting and working in close collaboration with other stakeholders in the field to reach its target audience all over the world. We are an outward-looking institution and we strive to serve our users in accordance with our mission: to make knowledge and information about Netherlandish art in an international context available to scholars and members of the general public worldwide.
The RKD manages a unique collection of archive, documentation and library material relating to Western art from the late Middle Ages to the present. The nucleus of the collections is made up of documentation on Netherlandish art. The RKD pursues an active programme of acquisitions in the areas of painting, drawing and sculpture as well as monumental art, modern media and design.
Our various holdings of visual, technical and press documentation as well as the library and archival collections can be consulted in our study rooms. Parts of the collection are also accessible through our online databases; you may find it useful to look here prior to visiting the RKD. Find out more about our holdings by consulting the overview of our collections on our website or by looking in the RKDcollections&archives database.
The core mandate of the RKD is to develop, explore, manage and promote its documentary, library and archival material.The staff members of the RKD regularly make scholarly or organizational contributions to exhibitions, publications, and symposia.
The RKD plays an important supporting role for museums, universities, auction houses, galleries, art dealers and other institutions, as well as for independent researchers, collectors and other interested individuals.The RKD primarily serves professionals and students who wish to consult the collections for their work or study, but private individuals conducting art-historical research are also most welcome.
The Visual Documentation Collection of the RKD is the largest collection of art-historical visual material in the world and contains more than six million photographs, reproductions, and slides of paintings, drawings, sculpture, graphic arts, and design. In addition the RKD owns microfiche copies of documentary material found at important sister institutions such as The Witt Library London and the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg. Each year the Visual Documentation Collection is expanded by more than 50,000 images.
In the visual documentation of the RKD the emphasis is on Dutch art but work by foreign artists is also documented. The visual documentation is arranged by country and period and is divided in the following subsidary collections:
Dutch and Flemish Old Master Paintings
Dutch and Flemish Old Master Drawings
Nineteenth-Century Dutch and Belgian Art
Modern and Contemporary Dutch and Belgian Art
Foreign Art
Portrait Iconography (Iconografisch Bureau)
Historical Topography
The online database RKDartists is the most important key to the visual documentary collection. A growing number of the photographs and reproductions can be consulted in RKDimages.
Bibliotheca Hertziana Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte
Courtauld Institute of Art
Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg
Federico Zeri Foundation
Frick Art Reference Library
Getty Research Institute
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Villa I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies
Warburg Institute
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Return to Amazon.com
Working at Amazon
Amazon.com Acquires Three Leading Internet Companies
Amazon.com Acquisitions Extend Company's Ability to Serve International Customers
SEATTLE, WA (April 27, 1998)--Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced that it has acquired three leading Internet companies: Bookpages, Ltd; Telebook, Inc.; and Internet Movie Database Ltd. Amazon.com expects online retailers Bookpages and Telebook to become fundamental components of its expansion into the European marketplace, and Internet Movie Database to support its eventual entry into online video sales.
"These acquisitions will enable Amazon.com to quickly offer European consumers the same combination of selection, service, and value that we now provide our U.S. customers," said Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO. "I'm excited about these companies because each has a relentless focus on customer service, an unwavering commitment to Internet commerce, and a smart, innovative management team."
Bookpages (www.bookpages.co.uk) is one of the largest online bookstores in the United Kingdom, providing access to all 1.2 million U.K. books in print. Bookpages Managing Director Dr. Simon Murdoch said of the acquisition, "This is fantastic news for Bookpages and its customers.g By combining Amazon.com's resources with Bookpages' in-depth knowledge of the U.K. marketplace, we can provide even better service and selection to our customers inside and outside of the United Kingdom."
Telebook (www.telebuch.de), operating through its ABC Bücherdienst subsidiary, is Germany's number one online bookstore, with a catalog of nearly 400,000 German-language titles. Telebook President Michael J.G. Gleissner commented, "Telebook's longtime local expertise in online bookselling in Germany combined with Amazon.com's worldwide brand and powerful technology will lead to tremendous benefits for the customer."
Originally launched in 1990, Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) is a comprehensive repository for movie and television information on the Internet. "Everyone at IMDb is excited about becoming a part of Amazon.com," said Colin Needham, IMDb Managing Director. "Because of their similar passion for books, the Amazon.com team understands and fully supports IMDb's mission of providing the best possible information to movie lovers."
Each of the acquisitions will be accounted for under the purchase method of accounting. The company will incur total charges of approximately $55 million in connection with all three transactions. Consideration was comprised of cash and common stock, and the company anticipates issuing an aggregate of approximately 540,000 shares of common stock as a result of these transactions.
Amazon.com, Inc., Earth's Biggest Bookstore, is the largest online retailer of books. Amazon.com offers a catalog of more than 3 million book, music, and other titles, plus easy-to-use search and browse features, e-mail services, personalized shopping services, secure Web-based credit card payment, and direct shipping to customers. Amazon.com has virtually unlimited online shelf space and offers customers a vast selection through an efficient search-and-retrieval interface, as well as streamlined ordering through 1-ClickSM technology. Amazon.com pioneered the concept of syndicated selling on the Internet and has more than 40,000 members in its Associates Program including AOL.com, Yahoo!, Netscape, Excite, the AltaVista Search Service, the @Home Network, the Prodigy Shopping Network, and iVillage.
This announcement contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, Amazon.com's limited operating history, the unpredictability of its future revenues, and risks associated with capacity constraints, management of growth, and new business opportunities. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results is included in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 1997, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Amazon.com, Earth's Biggest Bookstore, and 1-Click are service marks of Amazon.com, Inc. All other names are trademarks of their respective owners.
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Fear and Loathing in Barovia
Posted On 28.3.2017 Jukka Särkijärvi 0
Shelly Jones’s paper “The Psychological Abuse of Curse of Strahd” is a case study on how an adventure module for the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons explores and presents the topics of trauma and abuse to the players. Curse of Strahd is the reimagining of the classic 1983 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module I6 Ravenloft, updated for the current edition of the game.
The paper draws from the field of literary trauma studies and Cathy Caruth’s idea of trauma as cyclical, a repetition of the initial stressful event in different forms that echo the original source of the trauma. Also brought in is Tobi Smethurst’s work studying trauma in video games. However, whereas Smethurst focuses on the effects of the narrative on the player, Jones’s paper looks at Curse of Strahd and its accompanying Tarokka Deck as texts and game components.
The module is set in the land of Barovia, itself a reflection of the module’s main antagonist, the Bluebeard-inspired Count Strahd von Zarovich, a gentleman vampire in the style of Polidori’s The Vampyre. Strahd’s backstory is that he, a great military leader who conquered Barovia, fell in love with Tatiana, the bride of his younger brother Sergei. On their wedding day, Strahd killed his brother and Tatyana committed suicide. Since then, Strahd has been cursed to look for the next vessel of Tatyana’s soul, always leading in her death, perpetuating a cycle of abuse towards the people he rules and reliving his own trauma in a variety of ways, repeating the same set of pathological symptoms as he performs the past anew, again and again.
The land of Barovia is isolated by mists that disorient and exhaust those who venture into them, turning them around and returning them to where they left. Death affords no escape, either – the souls of people who die in Barovia cannot pass on into their afterlife and while they may be raised from the dead as normal, if more than a day has passed, they will gain a randomly determined form of madness. This reflects “the randomness and meaninglessness of […] death”, quoting Smethurst. The land also sees no sunlight, making the tracking of time difficult, much as trauma can disrupt a victim’s sense of time.
The characters encounter the results of trauma and abuse in the people of the land as well, as they have suffered under the predations of Strahd. They are emotionally numbed and living in a culture of fear, some of them going to great lengths to cope, such as an elf stoning his sister so that she would not come under Strahd’s attentions, or a mad abbot building flesh golems resembling Tatyana to appease Strahd.
The cyclical nature of trauma is reiterated in that Curse of Strahd has built-in replayability, a rarity for role-playing game modules. Key aspects of the module are randomized with the use of the fortunetelling Tarokka Deck, an actual deck of cards. This makes it possible for the players and even characters to revisit Barovia and experience the adventure anew, a sort of gothic Groundhog Day. The players can perform, witness and experience the psychology of trauma and Strahd’s abusive relationship with Tatyana and his people again and again.
Original Article: http://analoggamestudies.org/2017/01/the-psychological-abuse-of-curse-of-strahd/
Authors: Shelly Jones
Published in: Analog Game Studies, January 23 2017
#RPG
The Library of the Unmourned
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Home > Specialties > IVD Test Reagent/Kits, Serology, Virus, Rubella, IgG Antibody
IVD Test Reagent/Kits, Serology, Virus, Rubella, IgG Antibody
Definition : Serology reagents intended to detect immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies to rubella virus, an RNA virus of the genus Rubivirus, family Togaviridae. Rubella virus is the cause of an acute, usually benign infection, often affecting children; the disease is characterized by a pink rash beginning on the head and spreading to become generalized. Transplacental infection of a fetus may occur. Rubella is also called German measles and, in French and Spanish, rubeola.
Entry Terms : "Rubella IgG Antibody Determination Reagents" , "Reagents, Serology, Virus, Rubella, IgG Antibody"
1-12 of 12 Match(es).
Block Scientific Inc
Calbiotech Inc
Calbiotech specialty is in custom design of immunoassay products for human and animal applications.
Caldon Biotech inc
Caldon Biotech Inc. was incorporated in 1997 in the state of California in the United States. The strategic focus of the company is to become a provider of specialized products that are used in the clinical and research laboratories.
DRG International Inc
DRG International, Inc. is a leading specialty medical diagnostics and equipment manufacturer, and distributor with operations in more than 110 countries. Founded in 1970, DRG International provides a complete range of products and services to the diagnostics and cardiology-related medical community. DRG International's global headquarters is based in Mountainside, New Jersey
Grifols USA Inc
Grifols is a global healthcare company whose mission is to improve the health and well being of people around the world. We accomplish this mission by producing life-saving protein therapies for patients and by providing hospitals, pharmacies and healthcare professionals with the tools they need to deliver expert medical care.
Pointe Scientific Inc
Pointe Scientific, Inc. was founded in Detroit and incorporated in the State of Michigan in 1981. Pointe is a privately held company and has moved to larger quarters in 1984 (Detroit), in 1987 (Lincoln Park) and to our present 25,000 square foot, Canton, Michigan location in 2004.
Princeton BioMeditech Corp
Princeton BioMeditech Corporation is a world leader in rapid, point-of-care diagnostics. PBM focuses on developing and manufacturing high quality and innovative products. From the one-step pregnancy test to the rapid, 3-in-1 cardiac marker panel, and now rapid, quantitative Troponin I, PBM has introduced professionals and consumers around the world to the speed, ease of use and reliability of rapid, point of care diagnostics. PBM has developed and introduced an extensive menu of over 70 different rapid tests. With products in the areas of Fertility, Infectious Diseases, Drugs of Abuse, Tumor Markers, Cardiac Markers, Veterinary Diagnostics and Food and Environmental Diagnostics, PBM manufactures a wider range of simple, easy-to-use tests than any other company.
SeraCare Life Sciences
Sterling Diagnostics Inc
Sterling Diagnostics develops and manufactures clinical diagnostic reagents and supplies. We offer a full line of laboratory equipment and supplies to support you.
United Bio Research Inc
United Biotech, Inc was founded in 1984. UBI develops and manufactures products tailored to the need of medical professionals in engineering healthcare economies. From conception, products are designed for reliability, ease of use and cost effectiveness. Our products are unique for clinical assays in that all assays can be used with any open-ended 96-well platform (eg. universal microtiter plate reader).
Zeus Scientific Inc
ZEUS Scientific is a privately held corporation that was founded in 1976. The company began producing IFA (immunofluorescence assay) test systems followed ELISA and now multiplex (AtheNA Multi-Lyte) immunoassays. New products are developed to expand the menu which allows laboratories to run an increasing number of assays with common protocols and common reagents, as well as developing new tests to more accurately diagnose patients. In 1987 ZEUS Scientific was the first company to develop, receive appropriate regulatory clearance and bring to market a serological assay to test for Lyme disease – a condition with high prevalence in the local community where ZEUS Scientific is located.
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Is 3D going down?
Jul 24, 2018 by admin / 116 Views
Box office profits for stereoscopic movies in the U.S. and Canada fell 18% in 2017 to $1.3 billion, according to a new report by the Motion Picture Association of America.
Definitely the wprst showing in eight years, and a steep drop off from the $2.2 billion in revenues generated by 3D films in 2010, the year when “Avatar” generated a substantial amount of its box office grosses and helped kick off a revival of the format.
The declines accompany a larger drop in the domestic box office. Overall revenues fell roughly 2% in 2017 to $11.1 billion. The foreign box office, however, grew, hitting a record $40.6 billion.
The popularity of 3D and large screen releases varied by age group. They were most popular with moviegoers between the ages of 12 to 17, with consumers in that demographic seeing an average of 3.8 movies in 3D or large screen formats such as IMAX. Audiences over 60 saw the fewest number of 3D or large format films, averaging 2.8 films.
These are common statistics. What you don't see in the statistics is many truths that fortunately keep and will keep really good 3D alive and hopefully make it the norm. Or above norm with new technologies like 3D VR etc.
Many movies that people see in 3D were filmed in 2D and with One camera! Then the lazy companies translate them to look like 3D with cheap software algorithms that of course do not work properly.
As a result most people do not like 3D but the same people love 3D when the see a really nice made original 3D movie made with 2 or more cameras as it should be.
So the answer is Yes, Bad 3D that is, lazy companies do produce lame 3D and give the real 3D a really bad name. 3D done properly is AWESOME.
Unfortunatelly only James Cameron and 3D Movies.com, Ted Amaradidis and very few others know and produce real 3D movies.
Get it??
Ken Wilson
3dmovies.com
Cameron's 3D smash Avatar grossed $2.8 billion at the global box office in 2009 ( Capital Pictures )
Congratulations to James Cameron. Looks like he maybe the Only one who really know how to do 3D Stereoscopic Movies!
A second, third, fourth and fifth film coming to a cinema near you for the better part of the next decade, so they’re going to need to be pretty special.
Cameron, the Oscar-winning writer and director of Titanic and The Terminator, has insisted that the studio is “very happy” with his films despite originally green-lighting only a single follow-up.
We are very happy too and are looking forward to his 3D movies.
Ted Amaradidis
The 10 best 3D movies of 2018
A collection of 3D films, 3D movies and 3D pictures updated daily.
A collection of “3D Movies You Can Touch!” ®. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The 3D Film Company and Ted Amaradidis. For rights please read bellow.
This material is protected by copyright and has been copied by and solely for the advertising purposes of 3dmovies.com Inc. under license. You may not sell, alter or further reproduce or distribute any part of this coursepack/material to any other person. Where provided to you in electronic format, you may only print from it for your own private study and research. Failure to comply with the terms of this warning may expose you to legal action for copyright infringement and/or disciplinary action by 3dmovies.com Inc. For rights to use any of our pictures, video clips or movies please use our contact form. Most pictures are 6k resolution and almost all of our movies are filmed in 6k resolution soon to be upgraded to 8k.
3D Movies Enduring Value,
3D Movies Enduring Value, Delivering Entertainment Not Found at Home
Let's face it. 3D movies is an 9 billion dollar industry today.
There is no major Director or studio today that is not involved one way or another with stereoscopic 3D movies. That ncludes James Cameron, Cuarón, Favreau, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Ang Lee and many others.
3D may have suffered from bad conversions and dim projection, but interest from countries such as China and advances in display technology mean the format’s future is bright!
We are five years into the emergence of 3D as a major part of modern film viewing, and yet every year there remains the droning sound of some pundits predicting the demise of cinema's 3D "fad." When 2013 was predicted to be the first year witnessing a decline in 3D box office, entertainment media was quick to suggest this was finally evidence of the press' accuracy in insisting 3D was declining/dying/dead. But of course, despite the best efforts of opponents, 3D continues to contribute massively to global film receipts and won't be leaving any time soon
3D films comprised 12 of the top 13 highest-grossing films of this year so far, with those films amassing a huge $7.5+ billion and counting at the worldwide box office. The rest of 2014's 3D release have likewise contributed an additional $1+ billion to date, with several major 3D release still to come that should push the finally 3D box office tally over $10 billion and likely toward the $12 billion mark.
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Horror and Fantasy
A - ZA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Ace, Cathy
Born, raised and educated in Wales, Cathy enjoyed a successful career in marketing and training across Europe for twenty years before migrating to Vancouver, Canada. The author of the bestselling Cait...
Adams, Jane A.
Jane A. Adams is a British writer of psychological thrillers. Her first book, The Greenway, was nominated for a CWA John Creasey Award in 1995 and an Author's Club Best First Novel Award. Adams has a...
Aitken, Rosemary
Rosemary Aitken was born Rosemary Rowe in Penzance, Cornwall during the Second World War. The granddaughter of a tin-miner killed in the Levant mine disaster, she moved to New Zealand with her parents...
Altman, John
John Altman lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and children.
He was born in 1969 in White Plains, New York, and has travelled to every continent, including Antarctica. A graduate...
Marty Ambrose has been a writer most of her life, consumed with the world of literature whether teaching creative writing at in the MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University or creating her own...
Anderson, Lin
Lin Anderson is the author of eight crime novels featuring Glasgow-based forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod. Lin lived in Northern Nigeria for five years, and learned to windsurf on the hazardous River ...
Ashford, Jeffrey
Jeffrey Ashford is the author of the classic mystery The Burden of Proof, with other recent titles including A Sense of Loyalty and Criminal Innocence. ...
Atkins, Charles
Charles Atkins is a practising psychiatrist and member of the Yale Clinical Faculty. His first novel, "The Portrait (St. Martin's Press)," was published in 1998.
In addition to novels he has...
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The David Letterman Show (1997)
Added: Sep 4, 1997 | Duration: 05:12 | Views: 1624
September 4, 1997. Robert Carlyle attends "The David Letterman Show" to promote the releases of "Trainspotting", "The Full Monty" and "Plunkett and Macleane".
Face – Press Junket Interview
Added: Aug 1, 1997 | Duration: 04:34 | Views: 391
August 1997. Interview with Robert Carlyle and the cast and crew to promote the theatrical release of "Face".
The Full Monty – Press Junket Interview
1997. Interview with Robert Carlyle to promote the release of "The Full Monty".
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Royalairs.org
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Shine Shine Shine
1:05 pm 6 March 2015
From Goodreads: Sunny Mann has masterminded a life for herself and her family in a quiet Virginia town. Her house and her friends are picture-perfect. Even her genius husband, Maxon, has been trained to pass for normal. But when a fender bender on an average day sends her coiffed blonde wig sailing out the window, her secret is exposed. Not only is she bald, Sunny is nothing like the Stepford wife she’s trying to be. As her facade begins to unravel, we discover the singular world of Sunny, an everywoman searching for the perfect life, and Maxon, an astronaut on his way to colonize the moon.
Theirs is a wondrous, strange relationship formed of dark secrets, decades-old murders and the urgent desire for connection. As children, the bald, temperamental Sunny and the neglected savant Maxon found an unlikely friendship no one else could understand. She taught him to feel -- helped him translate his intelligence for numbers into a language of emotion. He saw her spirit where others saw only a freak. As they grew into adults, their profound understanding blossomed into love and marriage.
But with motherhood comes a craving for normalcy that begins to strangle Sunny’s marriage and family. As Sunny and Maxon are on the brink of destruction, at each other’s throats with blame and fear of how they’ve lost their way, Maxon departs for the moon, where he’s charged with programming the robots that will build the fledgling colony. Just as the car accident jars Sunny out of her wig and into an awareness of what she really needs, an accident involving Maxon’s rocket threatens everything they’ve built, revealing the things they’ve kept hidden. And nothing will ever be the same.
This was an interesting novel. I kind of cringe at my choice of words, interesting seems like such a throwaway word, but I can't seem to come up with anything else that makes sense. There were so many layers of this novel and each chapter...in addition to moving the plot forward, each chapter served as a way to delve deeper into Sunny and Maxon's history together and apart.
I'm not sure if I liked the characters in Shine Shine Shine, or at least Sunny and her family. I liked Maxon better, if only because he was unable to hide things and everything for him was black and white.
I'm not sure what I feel about Shine Shine Shine. I did like it overall and I'm looking forward to reading more by Lydia Netzer but it was one of those books that leaves you with ambiguous feelings that never quite seem to reconcile.
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Christofferson v. Washington (1969)
David L. Hudson Jr.
In: Encyclopedia of the Fourth Amendment
Edited by: John R. Vile & David L. Hudson Jr.
Subject: American Political History, American Political Thought, Law & Courts
Hudson, D. L. (2013). Christofferson v. washington (1969). In J. R. Vile & D. L. Hudson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of the fourth amendment (Vol. 1, pp. 163-164). Washington, DC: CQ Press doi: 10.4135/9781452234243.n143
Hudson, David L. "Christofferson v. Washington (1969)." In Encyclopedia of the Fourth Amendment, edited by John R. Vile and David L. Hudson, 163-164. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2013. doi: 10.4135/9781452234243.n143.
Hudson, D L 2013, 'Christofferson v. washington (1969)', in Vile, JR & Hudson, DL (eds), Encyclopedia of the fourth amendment, CQ Press, Washington, DC, pp. 163-164, viewed 18 July 2019, doi: 10.4135/9781452234243.n143.
Hudson, David L. "Christofferson v. Washington (1969)." Encyclopedia of the Fourth Amendment. Eds. John R. Vile and David L. Hudson. Vol. 1. Washington: CQ Press, 2013. 163-164. SAGE Knowledge. Web. 18 Jul. 2019, doi: 10.4135/9781452234243.n143.
In Christofferson v. Washington, 393 U.S. 1090 (1969), the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the Washington state court conviction of petitioner Peter Aandahl Christofferson, who had argued that his conviction for possession of marijuana was invalid ...
Entries by Letter: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y
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Research & Reviews: Journal of Inflammation
Research & Reviews: Journal of Zoological Sciences
Journal of Vascular Medicine & Surgery
Fisheries and Aquaculture Journal
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Open Access Articles- Top Results for Magnate
"Magnat" redirects here. For a wealthy or powerful business baron or executive, see Business magnate. For other uses, see Magnat (disambiguation).
File:Bacciarelli Jan Zamoyski.jpg
Jan Zamoyski, an important 16th-century Polish Magnate
Magnate, from the Late Latin magnas, a great man, itself from Latin magnus 'great', designates a noble or other man in a high social position, by birth, wealth or other qualities. In reference to the Middle Ages, the term is often used to distinguish higher territorial landowners and warlords such as counts, earls, dukes, and territorial-princes from the baronage.
1 England
3 Poland and Lithuania
4 Serbia
In England, the magnate class went through a change in the later Middle Ages. It had previously consisted of all tenants-in-chief of the crown, a group of more than a hundred families. The emergence of Parliament led to the establishment of a parliamentary peerage that received personal summons, rarely more than sixty families.[1] A similar class in the Gaelic world were the Flatha. In the Middle Ages a bishop sometimes held territory as a magnate, collecting the revenue of the manors and the associated knights' fees.[citation needed]
In the Tudor period, after Henry VII defeated Richard III at Bosworth Field, Henry made a point of executing or neutralizing as many magnates as possible. Henry VII would make parliament attaint undesirable nobles and magnates, thereby stripping them of their wealth, protection from torture, and power. Henry VII also used the Court of the Star Chamber to have powerful nobles executed. Henry VIII continued this approach in his reign; he inherited a survivalistic mistrust of nobles from his father. Henry VIII ennobled very few men and the ones he did were all "new men": novi homines, greatly indebted to him and having very limited power.
The term was specifically applied to the members (equivalent to British Peers) of the Upper House in the Apostolic Kingdom of Hungary, the Főrendiház or House of Magnates.
Poland and Lithuania
Main article: Magnates of Poland and Lithuania
Magnates were a social class of wealthy and influential nobility in the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania (and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), see Magnates of Poland and Lithuania
The magnates, velikaši, of Serbia in the Middle Ages held higher titles than the lesser nobles (see Serbian nobility). During the Serbian Empire (1345–71) the higher court members held titles such as despot, sevastokrator and kesar. During foreign rule under the Ottoman Empire, Habsburg Monarchy, Republic of Venice, and later in the Revolution, and Principality the magnates were influential voivodes (all voivodes were not considered magnates).
In Spain, since the late Middle Ages the highest class of nobility hold the appellation of Grandee of Spain.
Further information: Swedish nobility
In Sweden, the wealthiest medieval lords were known as storman (plural stormän), "great men", a similar description and meaning as the English term magnate.
Szlachta, in Poland
Boyar, in Eastern Europe
Velikaš, in Serbia and Croatia
^ Pugh, T.B (1972). "The magnates, knights and gentry". In S.B. Chrimes, C.D. Ross and R.A. Griffiths. Fifteenth-Century England, 1399-1509: Studies in Politics and Society. Manchester University Press. p. 86. ISBN 9780064911269. Retrieved 17 July 2013.
12px This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Magnates: How do they work?
This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Magnate; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA
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Open Access Articles- Top Results for Tad Lincoln
Tad Lincoln
For his grandfather, Amos Lincoln's father, see Thomas Lincoln.
File:Tad Lincoln in uniform.jpg
Lincoln wearing a military-style uniform, c. 1860s
Thomas Lincoln III
(1853-04-04)April 4, 1853
July 15, 1871(1871-07-15) (aged 18)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Lincoln Tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery
Elizabeth Street School
Mary Todd Lincoln
See: Lincoln family tree
Thomas "Tad" Lincoln III (April 4, 1853 – July 15, 1871) was the fourth and youngest son of Abraham and Mary Lincoln. The nickname "Tad" was given to him by his father, who found him "as wiggly as a tadpole" when he was a baby. Lincoln was known to be impulsive and unrestrained, and he did not attend school during his father's lifetime. He had free run of the White House, and there are stories of him interrupting Presidential meetings, collecting animals, and charging visitors to see his father. He died at the age of 18 on July 15, 1871, in Chicago.
2 White House years
Early life and education
Lincoln was born on April 4, 1853, the fourth son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd. His three elder brothers were Robert (1843–1926), Edward (1846–1850), and William (1850–1862). Named after his paternal grandfather Thomas Lincoln and uncle Thomas Lincoln, Jr., the fourth boy was soon nicknamed "Tad" by his father, for his small body and large head, and because he wiggled like a tadpole as an infant.[1] Lincoln's first name has occasionally been erroneously recorded as Thaddeus.[2]
Lincoln was born with a form of cleft lip and palate, causing him speech problems throughout his life. He had a lisp and delivered his words rapidly and unintelligibly.[3] Often only those close to Lincoln were able to understand him.[4][5] For example, he called his father's bodyguard, William H. Crook, "Took", and his father "Papa Day" instead of "Papa Dear".[6] The cleft palate contributed to uneven teeth; he had such difficulty chewing food that his meals were specially prepared.[7]
Lincoln and his brother Willie were considered "notorious hellions" during the period they lived in Springfield. They were recorded by their father's law partner William Herndon as having turned their law office upside down, pulling the books off the shelves, while their father appeared oblivious to their behavior.[8]
White House years
File:A&TLincoln.jpg
Tad Lincoln with his father looking at a photo album
Upon their father's election as President, both Tad and Willie moved into the White House and it became their new playground and home. At the request of Mrs. Lincoln, Julia Taft brought her younger brothers, 12-year-old "Bud" and 8-year-old "Holly", to the White House, and they became playmates of the two young Lincolns.[9][10]
In February 1862, both Lincoln boys contracted typhoid fever and both boys were bedridden. Willie died on February 20, while Tad recovered. After his brother's death, his parents became even more lenient toward Lincoln's behavior.[11]
During the time his father lived, Lincoln was impulsive, unrestrained, and did not attend school. John Hay wrote that the boy's numerous tutors in the White House usually quit in frustration. Lincoln had free run of the White House, and there are stories of him interrupting Presidential meetings, collecting animals, charging visitors to see his father, and more.[12]
On April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to Grover's Theatre to see the play Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp while his parents attended the performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre. That night, his father was fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth. When news of the assassination spread to Grover's Theatre, the manager made an announcement to the entire audience. Lincoln began running and screaming, "They killed Papa! They killed Papa!" He was escorted back to the White House while his mother pleaded to have him brought to his father's deathbed at the Petersen House. "Bring Tad—he will speak to Tad—he loves him so." Late that night an inconsolable Tad was put to bed by a White House doorman.[13] President Lincoln died the next morning, on Friday, April 15, at 7:22:19am.[14] About the death of his father Lincoln said:
Pa is dead. I can hardly believe that I shall never see him again. I must learn to take care of myself now. Yes, Pa is dead, and I am only Tad Lincoln now, little Tad, like other little boys. I am not a president's son now. I won't have many presents anymore. Well, I will try and be a good boy, and will hope to go someday to Pa and brother Willie, in Heaven.[15]
After the assassination, Mary, Robert and Tad Lincoln lived together in Chicago. Robert moved out after a short time, and Tad began attending school. In 1868, they left Chicago and lived in Europe for almost three years, in Germany and later in England.[16]
Lincoln suffered from what one modern commentator has called a "complex speech and language disorder" related to some form of a cleft lip or palate. This caused some problems when Lincoln was in school in Chicago. While at the Elizabeth Street School, his schoolmates sometimes called him "Stuttering Tad" because of the speech impediment,[17] which he was able to overcome as a teenager.[16]
On Friday morning, July 15, 1871, Lincoln died at the age of 18.[18] The cause of death has been variously referred to as tuberculosis,[19] a pleuristic attack,[20] pneumonia,[18] or congestive heart failure.[21][Note 1] Lincoln's death occurred at the Clifton House hotel in Chicago.[22] In an obituary, John Hay affectionately referred to him as "Little Tad".[23]
Funeral services were held for Lincoln in his brother Robert's home in Chicago. His body was transported to Springfield and buried in the Lincoln Tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery, alongside his father and two of his brothers. Robert accompanied the casket on the train, but Mary was too distraught to make the trip.[24]
Lincoln family tree
^ Emerson, Jason (2012). Giant in the Shadows:The Life of Robert T. Lincoln. SIU (Southern Illinois University) Press. p. 478. With serious effusion compressing the lungs and crowding the nearby heart, there was not enough oxygen to maintain the life centers of the brain (quoting Milton Shutes, "Mortality of the Five Lincoln Boys", Lincoln Herald, vol. 57 (Spring 1955), p. 7.)
^ Wead (2003), pp. 89–90.
^ Bayne (2001), p. 13
^ Hutchinson (2009), para. 2.
^ Hutchinson (2009), para. 11.
^ Bayne (2001), p. 3.
^ Wead (2003), p. 90.
^ Bayne (2001), pp. 1–3.
^ R. J. Brown Editor-in-Chief. "R. J. Brown. Tad Lincoln: The Not-so-Famous Son of A Most-Famous President". Historybuff.com. Retrieved June 18, 2013.
^ Richard A. R. Fraser, MD (February–March 1995). "How Did Lincoln Die?". American Heritage 46 (1).
^ a b Emerson, Jason (2012). Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln. SIU (Southern Illinois University) Press. Retrieved December 2, 2012.
^ Hutchinson, John M. (Winter 2009). "What Was Tad Lincoln's Speech Problem?". Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30 (1). Retrieved December 2, 2012.
^ a b "Abraham Lincoln and Chicago (Abraham Lincoln's Classroom)". The Lincoln Institute. Retrieved December 2, 2012.
^ Davenport, Don (2001). In Lincoln's Footsteps: A Historical Guide to the Lincoln Sites in Illinois. Big Earth Publishing. p. 210.
^ Emerson, Jason. Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012, P. 478.
^ "The Lincoln Boys". Library of Congress. Retrieved December 2, 2012.
^ Davenport, Page 153
^ Hay, John (1871). Michael Burlingame (2006), ed. At Lincoln's Side: John Hay's Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings. SIU (Southern Illinois University) Press. p. 111. Retrieved December 2, 2012.
^ Davenport, pages 153 –154
Bayne, Julia Taft; DeCredico, Mary A (2001). Tad Lincoln's Father (First Bison Books ed.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-6191-8. OCLC 248170310.
Hutchinson, John M. (Winter 2009). "What Was Tad Lincoln's Speech Problem?". Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association (University of Illinois Press) 30 (1). Retrieved July 22, 2011.
Randall, Ruth Painter (1955). Lincoln's Sons. Boston: Little, Brown. OCLC 9448054.
Wead, Doug (2003). All The Presidents' Children. New York: Atria Books. ISBN 0-7434-4631-3. OCLC 51616758.
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Tad Lincoln – brief biography
February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865
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Name Lincoln, Tad
Alternative names Lincoln, Thomas
Short description Fourth son of President Abraham Lincoln
Date of birth April 4, 1853
Place of birth Springfield, Illinois, United States of America
Date of death July 15, 1871
Place of death Chicago, Illinois, United States
This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Tad Lincoln; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA
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Open Access Articles- Top Results for Victoria%27s Secret
This article's lead section may not adequately summarize key points of its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. (May 2015)
Stanford Shopping Center, San Francisco, California, U.S.
(June 2, 1977 (1977-06-02))[1]
Roy Raymond
Three Limited Parkway, Columbus, Ohio, U.S.
1,017 company-owned stores
18 independently owned stores[2]
United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Mexico, China, Israel and Taiwan
Lori Greeley
(CEO of Victoria's Secret Stores)[3]
Sharen Jester Turney
(CEO and President of Victoria's Secret Megabrand and Intimate Apparel)
Underwear, women's clothing, lingerie, swimwear, footwear, fragrances and beauty products, and make up.
VictoriasSecret.com
Victoria's Secret is the largest American retailer of lingerie,[1][4][5] 2012 sales were $6.12 billion.[6] The company sells lingerie, womenswear, and beauty products through its catalogs (sending out 375 million a year), website, and its U.S. stores. Victoria's Secret is wholly owned by publicly traded L Brands company.[7]
1.1 1977: Founding
1.2 1977–1980: The early years
1.3 1982: Sale to The Limited
1.4 1983: Strategy change
1.5 1983–1990: Expansion into malls
1.6 1990–1993: Persistent quality problems
1.7 1993–1999: Nichols resolves quality problems
1.8 Early 2000s: Decelerating growth leads to brand overhaul
1.9 2006–2008: Growth
2 Products and marketing
2.1 Current products
2.1.1 Pink
2.1.2 Swimwear
2.1.3 Music CDs
2.2 Recent product history
2.3 Marketing
2.3.1 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show
2.3.2 Victoria's Secret Angels
2.3.3 Pink spokesmodels
4 Competitors
5 Operating divisions
5.1 Victoria's Secret stores
5.1.1 International expansion
5.1.2 International franchises
5.2 Victoria's Secret Direct
5.2.1 Catalog
5.2.2 E-commerce
5.3 Victoria's Secret Beauty
6.1 Name
6.2 Ownership
6.2.1 Victoria's Secret stores
6.2.2 Victoria's Secret Direct
6.2.3 Victoria's Secret Beauty
6.3 Environmental record
6.4 Legal proceedings
6.5 Manufacturing
7 Controversies
7.1 Lawsuits
7.2 Other issues
1977: Founding
Victoria's Secret was founded by Tufts University and Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus Roy Raymond, and his wife Gaye,[8] in San Francisco, California, on June 12, 1977.[4][9]
Eight years prior to founding Victoria's Secret, Raymond was embarrassed when purchasing lingerie for his wife at a department store. Newsweek reported him looking back on the incident from the vantage of 1981: "When I tried to buy lingerie for my wife," he recalls, "I was faced with racks of terry-cloth robes and ugly floral-print nylon nightgowns, and I always had the feeling the department-store saleswomen thought I was an unwelcome intruder."[10]
During the 1970s and 1980s, most women in America purchased "dowdy", "pragmatic", "foundation garments" by Fruit of the Loom, Hanes, and Jockey in packs of three from department stores and saved "fancier items" for "special occasions" like honeymoons.[11] "Lacy thongs and padded push-up bras" were niche products during this period found "alongside feathered boas and provocative pirate costumes at Frederick's of Hollywood" outside of the main stream product offerings available at department stores.[11]
Raymond studied the lingerie market for eight years[12] before borrowing $40,000 from his parents and $40,000 from a bank to establish Victoria's Secret: a store in which men could feel comfortable buying lingerie.[9][13] The company's first store was located in Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California.[14][15]
1977–1980: The early years
Victoria's Secret grossed $500,000 in its first year of business,[15] enough to finance the expansion from a headquarters and warehouse to four new store locations[16] and a mail-order operation.[9]
By 1980, Raymond had added two more San Francisco stores at 2246 Union Street and 115 Wisconsin Street.
By 1982, the fourth store (still in the San Francisco area) was added at 395 Sutter Street.[17] Victoria's Secret stayed at that 395 Sutter Street location until 1991, when it moved to the larger Powell Street frontage of the Westin St. Francis.[18]
In April 1982, Raymond sent out his 12th catalogue; each catalogue cost $3 (equivalent to $7.33 in 2016).[17] Catalogue sales now accounted for 55% of the company's $7 million annual sales.[17]
The Victoria's Secret stores at this time were "a niche player" in the underwear market. The business was described as "more burlesque than Main Street."[19]
1982: Sale to The Limited
Raymond's philosophy of focusing on selling lingerie to male customers became increasingly unprofitable and Victoria's Secret headed for bankruptcy.[11]
In 1982, it had grown to six stores, a 42-page catalogue, and was grossing $6 million annually. Raymond sold Victoria's Secret Inc. to Leslie Wexner, creator of Limited Stores Inc of Columbus, Ohio, for $1 million.[9][20][21] (Though the figure was not disclosed until later.)[20]
1983: Strategy change
In 1983, Leslie Wexner revamped Victoria's Secret. He discarded the money-losing model of selling lingerie to male customers and replaced it with one that focused on women.[22] Victoria's Secret transformed from "more burlesque than Main Street" to a mainstay that sold broadly accepted underwear. The "new colors, patterns and styles that promised sexiness packaged in a tasteful, glamorous way and with the snob appeal of European luxury" were supposed to appeal to and appease female buyers.[22] To further this image, the Victoria's Secret catalog continued the practice that Raymond began:[23] listing the company's headquarters on catalogs at a fake London address, with the real headquarters in Columbus, Ohio.[22] The stores were redesigned to evoke 19th century England.
From at least 1985 through to 1993, Victoria's Secret sold men's underwear.[24][25]
In 1986, four years after the sale, The New York Times commented, "in an industry where mark-downs have been the norm, the new emphasis is on style and service".[26] The lingerie business was changing fast.
1983–1990: Expansion into malls
In the five years after the purchase, The Limited had transformed a three store boutique into a 346 store retailer.[23][contradiction]
Howard Gross took over as president, from his position as vice-president, in 1985.[27]
In October that year, the Los Angeles Times reported that Victoria's Secret was stealing market share from department stores;[28] in 1986, Victoria's Secret was the only national chain of lingerie stores.[26]
The New York Times reported on Victoria's Secret's rapid expansion from four stores in 1982 to 100 in 1986; and analysts's expectations that it could expand to 400 by 1988.[26][29]
In 1987, Victoria's Secret was reportedly among the "best-selling catalogs".[30] In 1990 analysts estimated that sales had quadrupled to $120 in four years, making it one of the fastest growing mail-order businesses.[31]
The New York Times described it as a "highly visible leader", saying it used "unabashedly sexy high-fashion photography to sell middle-priced underwear."[32]
Victoria's Secret also released their own line of fragrances in 1991.[33]
1990–1993: Persistent quality problems
By the early 1990s, Victoria's Secret faced a gap in management that led to the "once hot lingerie chain" to be "plagued by persistent quality problems".[34][35] Howard Gross, who had grown the company into a "lingerie empire"[36] since Wexner's 1982 purchase, was moved to poorly performing L Brands subsidiary Limited Stores.[34] Business Week reported that "both divisions have suffered".[34]
1993–1999: Nichols resolves quality problems
Grace Nichols, who was President and CEO at that time,[37] worked to resolve the quality problems;[36] their margins tightened resulting slower growth in profits[34]
Victoria's Secret introduced the Miracle Bra selling two million within the first year; but faced competition from Sara Lee's WonderBra a year later. The company responded to their rival with a TV campaign.[38]
By 1998, Victoria's Secret's market share of the intimate apparel market was 14 percent.[39] That year Victoria's Secret also entered the $3.5 billion cosmetic market.[40]
In 1999, the company aimed to increase its coverage with Body by Victoria.[41]
Early 2000s: Decelerating growth leads to brand overhaul
In May 2000, Wexner installed Sharen Jester Turney, previously of Neiman Marcus Direct, as the new chief executive of Victoria's Secret Direct to turn around catalog sales that were lagging behind other divisions.[42][43] Forbes reported Turney articulating, as she flipped through a Victoria's Secret catalog, "We need to quit focusing on all that cleavage."[42]
In 2000, Turney began to redefine Victoria's Secret catalog from "breasts—spilling over the tops of black, purple and reptile-print underthings" to one that would appeal to an "upscale customer who now feels more comfortable buying La Perla or Wolford lingerie.";[42] "dimming the hooker looks" such as "tight jeans and stilettos"; and moving from "a substitute for Playboy in some dorm rooms," to something closer to a Vogue lifestyle layout, where lingerie, sleepwear, clothes and cosmetics appear throughout the catalog.[42]
Beginning in 2000, Grace Nichols, CEO of Victoria's Secret Direct, led a similar change at Victoria's Secret's stores - moving away from an evocation of 1800s England (or a Victorian bordello).[42]
2006–2008: Growth
By 2006, Victoria's Secret's 1,000 stores across the United States accounted for one third of all purchases in the intimate apparel industry.[44]
In May 2006, Wexner promoted Sharen Jester Turney from the Victoria's Secret catalog and online units to lead the whole company.[19] In 2008, she acknowledged "product quality that doesn't equal the brand's hype".[45]
In September 2006, Victoria's Secret reportedly tried to make their catalog feel more like magazines by head-hunting writers from Women's Wear Daily.[46]
Products and marketing
In the early 1980s, Victoria's Secret used FCB/Leber Katz Partners for the development of their brand, marketing, and advertising.[47]
In 1989, FCB/Leber Katz Partners and Victoria's Secret executed a national advertising campaign featuring for the first time in the company history a ten-page glossy insert that appeared in the November issues of Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Victoria, House Beautiful, Bon Appetit, New Woman, and People magazines.[48] Victoria's Secret used the insert to announce their expansion into the toiletries and fragrance business.[48] Up through to the ten page insert, Victoria's Secret growth had been driven by their catalog, sporadic ads in fashion publications, and word of mouth.[48]
File:Victoria's Secret Pink Store NYC, USA.JPG
Victoria's Secret Pink Store NYC
Main article: Pink (Victoria's Secret)
In 2002, swimwear was introduced and available via the web site and catalog; in the last three years, the swimwear has become more readily available in stores.[49]
With five CDs featuring romantic classical music that have sold more than one million copies each, Victoria's Secret in 1991 hired the London Symphony Orchestra to record a CD.[50]
Recent product history
In 2010, Victoria's Secret launched the Incredible bra.[51]
In 2012, Victoria's Secret launched the The Victoria's Secret Designer Collection described by Vogue as the company's "first high end lingerie line."[52]
File:Victoria's Secret Store 7, 722 Lexington Ave, New York, NY 10022, USA - Dec 2012.JPG
Over the course of Victoria's Secret's evolution, the company "has gone from being value-driven to creating a luxury-shopping experience and an aura of fashion associated with its product" which has been driven by marketing.[53]
The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is an annual "elaborate marketing tool for Limited Brands".[54] The show is a mix of "beautiful models scantily clad in lingerie" and A-list entertainers "And every year, it becomes less about fashion and more about show".[54]
The company gained notoriety in the early 1990s after it began to use supermodels in its advertising and fashion shows. Throughout the 2000s, Victoria's Secret has turned down celebrity models and endorsements.[55]
In 1999, Victoria's Secret's 30 second Super Bowl advertisement led to one million visits to the company's website within an hour of airing.[56]
In 2004, Victoria's Secret featured Bob Dylan in an advertisement to test new marketing possibilities while Victoria's Secret dropped their fashion show for 2004 as a result of the fallout from the Janet Jackson/Super Bowl incident that caused complaints from women's groups.[57][58][59]
The brand turned to social networking in 2009, opening an official Facebook page and later on official Twitter and Pinterest accounts. It also expanded its website to feature behind-the-scenes content about its catalog and commercial shoots, as well as its fashion show.
Main article: Victoria's Secret Fashion Show
Beginning in 1995, Victoria's Secret began holding their annual Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, which is broadcast on primetime American television.[60] Starting with the 1995 fashion show they are "a combination of self-assured strutting for women and voyeuristic pleasures for men—and lingerie becomes mainstream entertainment."[61]
Ken Weil, vice president at Victoria's Secret, and Tim Plzak, responsible for IT at Victoria's Secret's parent company Intimate Brands, led Victoria's Secret's first ever online streaming of their fashion show in 1999.[62] The 18 minutes webcast streamed February 2, 1999, was at the time the Internet's "biggest event" since inception.[62] The 1999 webcast was reported as a failure by a number of newspapers on account of some user's inability to watch the show featuring Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, and Stephanie Seymour[63] as a result of Victoria's Secret's technology falling short being able to meet the online user demand resulting in network congestion and users who could see the webcast receiving jerky frames.[62] In all, the company's website saw over 1.5 million visits while the Broadcast.com's computer's were designed to handle between 250,000 and 500,000 simultaneous viewers.[64] In total, 1.5 million viewers either attempted or viewed the webcast.[65]
The 1999 webcast served to create a database for Victoria's Secret of over 500,000 current and potential customers by requiring users to submit their contact details to view the webcast.[62] The next spring Victoria's Secret avoided technical issues by partnering with Broadcast.com, America Online and Microsoft.[62] The 2000 webcast attracted more than two million viewers.[43]
By 2011, the budget for the fashion show was $12 million up from the first show's budget of $120,000.[66]
Victoria's Secret Angels
Victoria's Secret started working with renowned models in the early 1990s, with the hiring of Stephanie Seymour, Karen Mulder, Yasmeen Ghauri, Elaine Irwin and Frederique van der Wal.[67][68][69] These models helped the brand gain notice and soon enough were featured in televised commercials.[68]
Angels is one of Victoria's Secret's lingerie lines, which was launched in 1997, with a commercial featuring Helena Christensen, Karen Mulder, Daniela Peštová, Stephanie Seymour, and Tyra Banks as well as rock star Tom Jones.[70][71] The commercial was a major success and the Angels began to be featured in various commercials, alongside other contract models for the brand such as Yasmeen Ghauri,[72] Inés Rivero[73] and Laetitia Casta.[74] From then onwards, the term Angel started to become synonymous with being a contracted spokesmodel for the brand and in February 1998, the Angels made their runway debut at Victoria's Secret's 4th annual fashion show, with Chandra North filling in for Christensen.[75]
Seymour, Mulder, Pestova, Banks, Casta and Heidi Klum were all featured in both of Victoria's Secret webcast and took part in the promotion as the brand's contract models.[76] Starting in 2001, the show has been televised and usually features the year's Angel line-up at the start of the show, starting with Pestova, Banks, Klum and Gisele Bundchen[nb 1]. In 2004 due the Super Bowl controversy, instead of a televised show, Victoria's Secret sent its five contract models (Banks, Klum, Bundchen, Adriana Lima and Alessandra Ambrosio) on a tour called Angels Across America, as by then, the word had become synonymous with Victoria's Secret spokesmodels.[77] The last original Angel, Tyra Banks, departed the following year, as Karolina Kurkova, Selita Ebanks and Izabel Goulart were hired.[78]
Among other recognitions, the Victoria's Secret Angels were chosen to be part of People magazine's annual "100 Most Beautiful People in the World" issue in 2007[79] and became the first trademark awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on November 13, 2007, with Klum, Lima, Ambrosio, Kurkova, Goulart, Ebanks, Marisa Miller and Miranda Kerr at hand.[80] Alongside new Angel Doutzen Kroes, they also took part in the grand reopening of the Fontainebleau in Miami in 2008.[81] In 2009, it was widely reported that Candice Swanepoel, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Chanel Iman, Emanuela de Paula and Lindsay Ellingson had been hired by the brand.[82] However, De Paula was absent from the fashion show and Erin Heatherton was credited in her place, alongside the Angels (Klum, Ambrosio, Kerr, Miller, Kroes and Behati Prinsloo, with Lima being on maternity leave).[83] The brand also held a nationwide competition to hire a new "runway Angel" (as are dubbed all the models who walk in the show), Kylie Bisutti was crowned as the winner but soon parted ways with the brand.[84] In the following year-and-a-half Swanepoel, Huntington-Whiteley, Iman, Heatherton and Ellingson all were revealed as Angels.
Various tours have been held featuring the Angels, such as the Bombshell Tour in 2010 (featuring Lima, Swanepoel and new recruit Lily Aldridge), a VSX tour in 2013 (featuring Swanepoel, Ambrosio, Ellingson and Aldridge) and a Swim Tour in 2013 (featuring Swanepoel, Ellingson and Heatherton). The Angels have been heavily featured on the brand's social media, including on a short-lived Facebook application in 2013-2014 highlighting the Angels (then including Lima, Ambrosio, Kerr, Kroes, Prinsloo, Swanepoel, Heatherton, Ellingson, Aldridge and Karlie Kloss) as well as Lais Ribeiro, Toni Garrn and Barbara Palvin.[85]
Ellingson, Kroes and Kloss all departed soon after the 2014 fashion show, leaving the brand with only 5 Angels.[86][87] In 2015, the Angels as well as models Elsa Hosk, Joan Smalls, Lais Ribeiro, Martha Hunt, Jasmine Tookes, Stella Maxwell and Monika 'Jac' Jagaciak were featured on the brand's first ever Swim Special. Soon after, in the brand's biggest group hiring ever, all but Smalls were revealed as Angels, along with long time catalog regulars Lais Ribeiro and Sara Sampaio as well as Kate Grigorieva, Taylor Marie Hill and Romee Strijd.[88][89]
Other notable spokesmodels for the brand have included: Claudia Schiffer,[90] Eva Herzigová,[75] Oluchi Onweagba,[91] Jessica Stam,[92] Ana Beatriz Barros,[93] and Bregje Heinen[94] as well as a handful of celebrities such as Taylor Momsen.[95]
Current Victoria's Secret Angels include from left Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, Behati Prinsloo, Candice Swanepoel, Kate Grigorieva, Taylor Marie Hill, Elsa Hosk, Monika Jagaciak and Jasmine Tookes (Lily Aldridge, Martha Hunt, Stella Maxwell, Lais Ribeiro, Sara Sampaio, Romee Strijd not pictured)
Contract[nb 2]
First hiring
Runway shows[96]
23x15px United States Stephanie Seymour 1997–2000[70] 1992[68] 1995–2000 [nb 3]
23x15px Denmark Helena Christensen 1997–1998[70][75] 1996[97] 1996–1997
23x15px Netherlands Karen Mulder 1997–2000[70] 1992[98] 1998–2000
23x15px Czech Republic Daniela Peštová 1997–2002[70] 1996[99] 1998–2001
23x15px United States Tyra Banks 1997–2005[70][100] 1996 1996–2005
23x15px Canada Yasmeen Ghauri 1998[101] 1992 1996-1997
23x15px United States Chandra North 1998 Fashion Show[102] 1998 1998 [nb 4]
23x15px Argentina Inés Rivero 1998–1999[103] 1998 1998–2001
23x15px France Laetitia Casta 1998–2002[103] 1997 1997–2000
23x15px Germany/23x15px USA[104] Heidi Klum 1999–2010[105] 1997[105] 1997–2009 (host only in 2006) [nb 5]
23x15px Brazil Gisele Bündchen 2000–2007[106] 1999 1999–2006
23x15px Brazil Adriana Lima 2000–present[107] 1999[108] 1999–2008, 2010–present
23x15px Brazil Alessandra Ambrosio 2004–present[109] 2000 2000–present
23x15px Czech Republic Karolína Kurková 2005–2008[110][111] 2000 2000–2008, 2010
23x15px Cayman Islands Selita Ebanks 2005–2009[112] 2004 2005–2010
23x15px Brazil Izabel Goulart 2005–2008 2004 2005–present
23x15px United States Marisa Miller 2007–2010[113][114] 2002[115] 2007–2009
23x15px Australia Miranda Kerr 2007–2013[116][117] 2005[118] 2006–2009, 2011–2012
23x15px Netherlands Doutzen Kroes 2008–2014[119][120][121] 2004 2005–2006, 2008–2009, 2011–present
23x15px Namibia Behati Prinsloo 2009–present[122] 2007 2007–present
23x15px United Kingdom Rosie Huntington-Whiteley 2010–2011 2005[123] 2006–2010
23x15px South Africa Candice Swanepoel 2010–present 2007 2007–present
23x15px United States Chanel Iman 2010–2012 2008[124] 2009–2011
23x15px United States Erin Heatherton 2010–2013[105][109] 2008 2008–2013
23x15px United States Lily Aldridge 2010–present[109][125][126] 2008 2009–present
23x15px United States Lindsay Ellingson 2011–2014 2006 2007–present [nb 6]
23x15px United States Karlie Kloss 2013–2015[127][128] 2011 2011–present
23x15px Russia Kate Grigorieva 2015–present[88][89] 2014 2014–present [nb 7]
23x15px United States Taylor Marie Hill 2015–present[88][89] 2014 2014–present
23x15px Sweden Elsa Hosk 2015–present[88][89] 2011 2011–present
23x15px United States Martha Hunt 2015–present[88][89] 2012 2013–present
23x15px Poland Jac Jagaciak 2015–present[88][89] 2013 2013–present
23x15px Ireland Stella Maxwell 2015–present[88][89] 2014 2014–present
23x15px Brazilian Lais Ribeiro 2015–present[88][89] 2010 2010-2011 ; 2013–present
23x15px Portugal Sara Sampaio 2015–present[88][89] 2013 2013–present
23x15px Netherlands Romee Strijd 2015–present[88][89] 2014 2014–present
23x15px United States Jasmine Tookes 2015–present[88][89] 2012 2012–present
^ There have been various instances where the fashion show credits included models who weren't Angels but were prominently featured by the brand, such as Selita Ebanks and Izabel Goulart in 2005, Candice Swanepoel, Lindsay Ellingson, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Erin Heatherton and Behati Prinsloo in 2009, Lais Ribeiro in 2011, PINK model Elsa Hosk in 2013 and Hosk, Ribeiro, Jasmine Tookes, Martha Hunt and Stella Maxwell in 2014. All of them later went on to become Angels
^ Most Angels started working with the company years prior to signing an Angel contract. Listed above are the dates of first published or aired campaigns or, by default, first runway show or event.
^ Stephanie Seymour was a Fashion Show host in 1995
^ Chandra North was featured as an Angel solely during the 1998 fashion show due to Christensen's absence
^ Heidi Klum was a Fashion Show host in 2002, 2006–2009
^ Lindsay Ellingson was first featured on VS All Access in 2010 but was only credited as an Angel for the fashion show from the following year onward.
^ 10 Angels were added at the same time
Pink spokesmodels
23x15px Brazil Alessandra Ambrosio 2004–2006[129]
23x15px Australia Miranda Kerr 2006–2008[130]
23x15px Namibia Behati Prinsloo 2008–2011[131][132]
23x15px Sweden Elsa Hosk 2011–present[133]
Victoria's Secret is known for its catalogs and its annual fashion show, the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, and has been credited with single-handedly transforming "America's conception of lingerie"[16] by pioneering "sexy underwear as fashion"[31][32] and "lingerie mainstream entertainment."[61][134] The societal manifestation is "the increased cultural acceptance of shopping for undies" in the United States.[135][136]
Victoria's Secret is credited with "transforming lingerie from a slightly embarrassing taboo into an accessible, even routine accessory."[44] In 2006 The New York Times reported that traditional fashion was influenced by intimate apparel "in part because of the influence of Victoria's Secret – and ubiquitous, sexually charged come-hither marketing."[44]
In 1998 Gap launched a direct competitor to Victoria's Secret: GapBody.[137][138]
In 2008 Women's Wear Daily reported that while "Victoria's Secret dominates" in the lingerie market "the competition is intensifying".[139]
American Eagle Outfitters also launched a direct competitor to Victoria's Secret, the underwear line Aerie, which is currently their biggest competitor within the younger customers.
Operating divisions
Victoria's Secret on Lexington Avenue, New York
Victoria Secret's operations are organized into three divisions: Victoria's Secret Stores (stores), Victoria's Secret Direct (online and catalog operations), and Victoria's Secret Beauty (their bath and cosmetics line). The company does business in the following retail formats: general merchandise stores, apparel stores.[citation needed]
Victoria's Secret stores
Victoria's Secret stores 1982–2012
# of stores
Store sales in millions of U.S. dollars
1982 4[17] $3.15[17]
1985 84[28]
1988 237[47]
1989 326[140]-353[48] $428[141]
1990 386[136] $600[141]
1991 448[141]
1994 600[38] $1,181[144]
1995 600[145] $1,286[146]
1999 902[149] $2,100[42]
2005 $3,200[150]
2011 1,028[151]
2012 1,017[151]-1050[152]
File:Red lingerie from Victoria's Secret.jpg
A store display
File:Victoria's Secret store in Las Vegas.jpg
Victoria's Secret in Las Vegas, Nevada
Throughout the 1980s Victoria's Secret took over the market using "faux-British veneer, romantic styling and soft classical music."[39][153] In 2000 the Los Angeles Times reported that Victoria's Secret continued the practice of putting "on a British air—or what the Ohio-based chain thinks Americans believe is British. Boudoirish. Tony. Upscale."[149]
During the 1990s Victoria's Secret saw a 30% increase in store sales after the use of analyzing in their data warehouse in which specific store the styles, sizes and color of which bras were selling.[154]
As of 2010 there are 1,000 Victoria's Secret lingerie stores and 100 independent Victoria's Secret Beauty Stores in the US, mostly in shopping centers. They sell a range of brassieres, panties, hosiery, cosmetics, sleepwear, and other products. Victoria's Secret mails more than 400 million of its catalogs per year.[155]
During the 1990s store sizes grew from the average 1,400 square feet to between 4,000 and 5,000 square feet.[48] By 1989 50 stores had been updated to reflect "an English feel".[48] In 2002 the average Victoria's Secret store was 6,000 square feet.[24][156]
Victoria's Secret Canada stores 2011–2012
2011 12[151]
File:Victoriassecretstoremap.png
Map of Victoria's Secret stores in the U.S., as of August 2011
Up until the early 2000 management at Victoria's Secret actively decided to not expand outside the United States.[53] The drive to continue growing coupled with facing a maturing of the American retail market led to a change in that decision and to expand Victoria's Secret outside the United States.[53] Victoria's Secret announced the company's plan to expand into Canada in 2010.[157] The company opened 23 stores[citation needed] stores in Canada with locations in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec[158] and Nova Scotia.
In November 2005, the company opened its first boutique in the UK at Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5 with the help of World Duty Free.[159] This was followed in 2009 with several Victoria's Secret Travel and Tourism stores residing within airports outside the United States. These include locations in Schiphol International Airport, The Netherlands.[160][161]
Victoria's Secret opened their first store located at the Westfield Shopping Centre, Stratford, London[162] on July 24, 2012.[163] Their flagship 40,386 square-foot store on New Bond Street, London opened on August 29, 2012,[164] and there will be further nationwide expansion across the UK. Victoria's Secret executive vice president and chief administrative officer Martyn R Redgrave told Women's Wear Daily "That's what we're looking to do as we expand, in the U.K. in particular, and those will be company-owned and operated".[165] Through 2013 and 2014 stores opened across the UK, in Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and stores in Westfield London , Bluewater and Brent Cross across London.
In 2010 Victoria Secret's expanded with franchises internationally.
The first franchise store in Latin America opened in Isla Margarita, Venezuela on June 25, 2010 followed by other stores in the country, and in Bogota, Colombia, in July 2012 selling beauty products and accessories. Angel's Group, the Colombian company operating the franchise, is planning to open 10 stores in Colombia.[166] Victoria's Secret is also planning on opening a store in the exclusive Multiplaza Mall in San Salvador, El Salvador.[167]
In 2010 M.H. Alshaya Co. opened the first Victoria's Secret store in the Middle East region in Kuwait. M.H. Alshaya Co. operates the Victoria's Secret franchise located in the Marina Mall selling products including "cosmetic and branded accessories, but it has left out the brand's infamous lingerie line".[168]
The Brand's first Caribbean store opened in November 2011 at Plaza Las Americas in San Juan, Puerto Rico.[169] Two stores also opened in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic at the Agora,[170] (mainly selling beauty products and accessories) and Sambil Santo Domingo[171] malls in August 2012 and October 2012, respectively.
The first Polish store is opening its doors in July 2012 at Złote Tarasy in Warsaw and will be operated by M.H. Alshaya Co. New Victoria's Secrets shop open in July 24, 2012. This will be the first Victoria's Secret franchise store in Europe, just a day before the new store in the United Kingdom. However, as this is a franchise store it sells just beauty and accessories,[172] whereas the London stores are the first company owned European stores and sell Victoria's Secret clothing.[165]
The first Serbian Victoria's Secret store will open its doors in January 2014 at the Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade.[173] This will be the first Victoria's Secret store opened in ex-Yugoslavia.
Victoria's Secret Direct
Victoria's Secret catalog 1982–2012
Millions mailed
Sales in millions of U.S. dollars
1982 $3.85[17]
1990 $270[141]
1993 185 $436[143]
1999 365[149] $800[42]
2002 374 $870
Prior to the emergence of e-commerce, the Victoria's Secret's catalogs provided both an informative and exciting experience in the comfort of the consumer's home.[154]
The catalog under Raymond's leadership took the form of an upmarket version of Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie catalog being more sensuous than the catalog published under the future leadership of The Limited.[176] In 1982 the Victoria's Secret catalog cost $3.[17]
The New York Times reported that the Victoria's Secret's financial success catalogues' influenced other catalogues who changed to present lingerie as "romantic and sensual but tasteful" "in which models are photographed in ladylike poses against elegant backgrounds."[17]
This led to Victoria's Secret dominating the catalog field for "lingerie and sexy nightwear." The catalogs allowed for consumers to review the entire spectrum of product offerings, along the axes of style, color and fabric. Victoria's Secret accepted catalog orders via telephone 24 hours a day.[154]
Catalog mailing rose for twenty years from 1978 peaking at 400 million mailings annually in 1998.[citation needed] From 1998 through to 2002 mailings declined to 350 million annually.[citation needed]
Victoria's Secret's catalog offers a more diverse range of merchandise.[24]
The Los Angeles Times described the catalog in 2000 as having achieved "an almost cult-like following."[149]
In 1995 Victoria's Secret began building its e-commerce website which the company launched after three years of development at 6 p.m. December 4, 1998, using the domain VictoriasSecret.com.[175] Twenty minutes later the first order was placed on the website from a Littleton, Colorado, customer at 6:20 p.m.[177]
It was reported that the three year development was a result of the company's concern of rolling out a half-baked website that could "discourage return visits".[175]
Viewers who logged onto the Victoria's Secret's website to view the company's first webcast of their fashion show on February 3, 1999, were unable to view the webcast due to the Internet infrastructure Victoria Secret's selected was unable to meet user demand causing some users to be unable to view the webcast.[178]
A decade later in 2008 Victoria's Secret launched their website in Spanish.[citation needed]
Launch of VS All Access website.[citation needed]
Victoria's Secret Beauty
The Limited, Inc in 1998 creates Intimate Beauty Corporation with a mandate to establish a group of beauty businesses with Victoria's Secret Beauty being the first company in the firm's portfolio.[citation needed]
In November 2012 Susie Coulter became president of Victoria's Secret Beauty; the company's beauty division located in New York City[179]
Prior to the 1982 sale the company's business name was Victoria's Secret, Inc. then afterwards the name was changed to Victoria's Secret Stores, Inc. In 2005 the company changed to Victoria's Secret Stores, LLC.[citation needed]
Victoria's Secret was originally owned by "The Limited".[180] In 2002 Wexner reincorporated Victoria's Secret into the Limited; previously Victoria's Secret's parent company was Intimate Brands, a separately traded entity whose President was Ed Razek.[19][62]
By 2006, 72% of Limited Brands' revenue—and almost all of their profits—came from their Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works units.[181]
On July 10, 2007, the Victoria's Secret parent company, Limited Brands, sold a 75% interest in their apparel brands, Limited Stores and Express to Sun Capital Partners, to focus on expanding their Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works units.[182] The immediate impact of the sale resulted in Limited Brands taking a $42 million after-tax loss.[183]
In 1985, Howard Gross was promoted to president from vice president.[27] In 1991 Grace Nichols replaced Gross as president of Victoria's Secret Stores. Nichols previously had been "executive vice president and general merchandise manager of Limited's lingerie division."[184]
In 1998, Cynthia A. Fields became the president & chief executive of the company (when it was a division of Intimate Brands Inc.).[175][185]
In May 2000, Wexner installed Sharen Jester Turney, who had previously worked at Neiman Marcus Direct, as the new chief executive of Victoria's Secret Direct.[42]
File:Victoria's Secret Beauty Logo.svg
Victoria's Secret Beauty logo
In May 2006, Christine Beauchamp was named president and CEO of Victoria's Secret Beauty. Beauchamp was succeeded by Shashi Batra in 2009, who became president of Victoria's Secret Beauty.[186]
Robin Burns was CEO of Victoria's Secret Beauty.[53]
After two years of pressure from environmentalist groups, Victoria's Secret's parent firm and a conservation group reached an agreement to make the lingerie retailer's catalog more environmentally friendly in 2006.[187][188] The catalog would no longer be made of pulp supplied from any woodland caribou habitat range in Canada, unless it has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. The catalogs will also be made of 10 percent recycled paper.[189]
The company has bought organic and fair trade-grown cotton to make some of its panties.[190][191]
On March 4, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Victoria's Secret in Moseley v. V Secret Catalogue, Inc. that there must be proof of actual harm to the trademark.[192][193]
In 2006 it was reported that Victoria's Secret paid workers $7 per day to make bras for them in Thai factories.[194]
One-tenth of all Victoria's Secret's brassieres are sourced via Intimate Fashions, a manufacturer with factories in the South Indian city of Guduvanchery.[citation needed]
Victoria's Secret was sued several times during 2009. The suits alleged that defective underwear contained formaldehyde that caused severe rashes on women who wore them. Six cases were filed in Ohio and two in Florida. At least 17 other suits were filed in six other states after January 2008.[195][196][197]
The plaintiff refused to submit to a simple patch test to determine the precise cause of her reaction and her case was later withdrawn.[198] The Formaldehyde Council issued a statement that formaldehyde quickly dissipates in air, water and sunlight.[199]
2012 - A Victoria's Secret supplier was investigated for use of child labor in harvesting cotton used to make its products.[200][201][202]
2012 - Sued by Zephyrs; "has been accused of breaching a 2001 agreement and selling cheap 'knockoffs' of the company's stockings."[203]
2012 - Drew criticism for a newly released lingerie collection titled "Go East" whose tagline pledged to women the capacity to "indulge in touches of eastern delight with lingerie inspired by the exquisite beauty of secret Japanese gardens."[165][204] The collection included a mesh teddy "Sexy Little Geisha" featuring "flirty cutouts and Eastern-inspired florals". The WSJ reported that the collection was "accessorized with a miniature fan and a kimono-esque obi sash." Victoria's Secret removed the Asian-themed collection "that traded in sexualized, generic pan-Asian ethnic stereotypes."[3][205][206]
2014 - A petition against the newly released lingerie collection called "Body" was created when the poster ads displayed the words 'THE PERFECT "BODY"' over well-known VS Angels. The petition, while becoming popular across social media, demanded that Victoria's Secret "apologise and take responsibility for the unhealthy and damaging message that their ‘Perfect Body’ campaign sends out about women’s bodies and how they should be judged." and further added "change the wording on their advertisements for their bra range Body, to something that does not promote unhealthy and unrealistic standards of beauty, as well as pledge to not use such harmful marketing in the future." and created the hashtag "#iamperfect", which trended on Twitter for body shaming women. The petition had over 30,000 signatures. Although there was never a formal apology released, Victoria's Secret took note of the petition and changed the words on their ad campaign to 'A BODY FOR EVERY BODY.'
32x28px Companies portal
32x28px Fashion portal
List of swimwear brands
List of Victoria's Secret models
Victoria's Secret Swim Special
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BREAKING! BOMBSHELL: Mexico Is Sending 15,000 Troops to the U.S. Border, & It’s All Because of Trump
Tue, June 25, 2019 at 12:32
Mark "Snooper" Harvey in Illegal Invasionistas, Mexico Troops to our Southern Border
Yessir!
15,000 troops are being sent to the U.S./Mexico border. But they’re not American troops. It’s looking like President Trump’s deal with America’s southern neighbor to try and stem the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. is already working wonders. Mexico has deployed almost 15,000 troops to the US-Mexico border, according to the country’s Secretary of Defense Luis Sandoval. “In the northern part of the country, we have deployed a total of almost 15,000 troops composed of National Guard elements and military units,” Sandoval announced today in Cancun. Approximately 2,000 National Guard members have already been deployed to Mexico’s southern border with Belize and Guatemala, he noted, adding to the 4,500 troops already spread across the area. Many migrants begin their journey in Central America and even further south, passing through Mexico on their way toward the United States. … (go read the rest)
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Becker1999/Flickr
Green Leftists Prepare to Give Democratic Candidates Hell
Even progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Jay Inslee are facing skepticism from climate activists.
By Emily Atkin
On Tuesday, two days after Elizabeth Warren announced her candidacy for president, an aide gave a statement to Axios that suggested the Massachusetts senator intends to court the green-leftist vote: “Senator Warren has been a longtime advocate of aggressively addressing climate change and shifting toward renewables, and supports the idea of a Green New Deal to ambitiously tackle our climate crisis, economic inequality, and racial injustice.”
But for some environmentalists, this rather anodyne statement was cause for concern, not celebration: She only supports the idea of a Green New Deal?
Those words are a worrying caveat, said RL Miller, political director of the super PAC Climate Hawks Vote, who noted that Warren hasn’t signed the Green New Deal’s pledge not to accept campaign donations from fossil fuel companies. “This will be our litmus test,” Miller said. “You don’t sign on to this, we don’t support you, period, full stop.”
Miller isn’t alone in her skepticism. Jack Clarke, the policy director at Mass Audubon, recently told E&E News that Warren “does not have a record of advocacy and leadership on climate change issues.” The news outlet surveyed the climate community about Warren’s record, and activists “struggled to name a climate issue on which the senator has made a name for herself.”
Make no mistake: Warren has a strong environmental record. She has near-perfect lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, and last year introduced a bill that would require public companies to disclose climate-related business risks. The fact that climate activists are hesitant to embrace the top progressives of the 2020 field shows how much the politics of climate change have shifted since 2016. The green vote matters more than ever—and it will be harder than ever to win it.
It’s no longer enough to repeatedly declare that global warming is real, or even to make the issue central to your campaign, as senators Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley reportedly will do if they run for president. Even declaring that climate change is your top priority might not be enough. Earlier this week, when he effectively announced his candidacy in an interview with The Atlantic, Washington Governor Jay Inslee made clear what his top priority would be: He called climate change “the defining challenge of our time,” adding that there’s a “need for a presidential candidate who will put fighting climate change front and center. This is our legacy.”
For millions of Americans, climate change is no longer just a graph or a chart. It's floodwater invading their homes. It's ash on their tongues from raging wildfires. From Washington State to Texas to Puerto Rico, we are living climate change right now.
— Jay Inslee (@JayInslee) January 2, 2019
Inslee is already being called the “climate candidate,” and perhaps rightly so. Unlike potential candidates such as senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, “Inslee is the only one who has actually run a government that has made climate-change policy central,” The Atlantic noted:
He was elected governor in 2012 and has, without much national notice, pursued arguably the most progressive and greenest agenda in the country, with fields of solar panels, fleets of electric buses, and massive job growth to show for it. And years before anyone was tweeting about the “Green New Deal,” Inslee wrote a climate-change book while he was in Congress: Apollo’s Fire, a 2007 blueprint for how much economic and entrepreneurial opportunity there is in saving the planet.
And yet, even Inslee is not immune to criticism from the environmental left. “Where’s the racial justice component in his overall climate approach?” asked Anthony Rogers-Wright, the deputy director of RegeNErate Nebraska. Miller is concerned that Inslee might approve a $2 billion methanol refinery in Washington, a controversial project which green groups say would “fuel the climate catastrophe [Inslee] is supposed to help curb, not escalate.”
These are the sorts of questions that climate activists are itching to ask in the upcoming primary season—and they may finally have the leverage to demand specific, unconditional answers.
At lot has changed since the 2016 election, when global warming barely featured in the televised debates. Last year brought record-breaking extreme weather that caused billions of dollars worth of damage across the country and world, and scientists sounded more alarmed than ever. The most frightening report, released by the United Nations in October, said the world only has about a decade to rein in emissions before irreversible catastrophic impacts begin.
Meanwhile, President Trump is withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord and is in the process of rolling back nearly a dozen climate regulations. A report in The New York Times this week showed how these moves present an opportunity for Democrats. An Indiana county that voted overwhelmingly for Trump has seen a rash of childhood cancer, and recent tests at an old industrial site revealed “a carcinogenic plume spreading underground, releasing vapors into homes.” The specific chemical—trichloroethylene, or TCE—is one for which Trump wants to weaken restrictions.
The increasingly dire news about global warming, and Trump’s furious assault on climate regulations, have turned the issue into one of the top priorities among Democratic voters. As the party’s base shifts left, it’s demanding more aggressive positions from politicians—and applying more aggressive tactics against politicians who don’t. Nearly 150 activists were arrested in one of two protests the Sunrise Movement held at the U.S. Capitol late last year, where they demand that Democrat leaders like Nancy Pelosi explicitly support the specifics of a Green New Deal.
“In 2020, people are going to be actually listening intently to what Democrats have to say about climate change,” Rogers-Wright said. “And there are gonna be some people running who have some explaining to do.” Stephen O’Hanlon, Sunrise’s communications director, said the group is “focused on pushing all the candidates to back the Green New Deal and reject fossil fuel money, which is the minimum they need to do in order to be taken seriously by our generation.”
The 2020 candidates are all vulnerable in one way or another. Warren is far from the only potential Democratic presidential candidate who hasn’t signed the pledge; Booker, Harris, Inslee, and O’Rourke haven’t as well. In O’Rourke’s case, he had signed the pledge while running his unsuccessful Senate campaign against Ted Cruz, but was removed after it was revealed that he accepted $430,000 from oil and gas industry employees. That’s a potential deal-breaker for some. “Solving climate change requires essentially dismantling the fossil fuel industry,” Rogers-Wright said. “How can we expect you’re going to dismantle a group that’s investing in you?”
But being the leftmost Democrat on climate change is no guarantee of support, either. Merkley has signed the no-fossil-fuels pledge, and has been a leader in introducing climate legislation in the Senate, but Rogers-Wright questioned his effectiveness. “You have to do so much more than have the policy to solve the climate crisis,” he said. “It will require a lawmaker who is skilled at bringing people together and holding people together, and I don’t know that Merkley has those chops.”
So who is leading the pack, as far as climate activists are concerned?
“I’m not sure anyone is really excited [about the 2020 field] yet,” said Miller of Climate Hawks Vote. O’Hanlon said that Sunrise has met with staffers from a number of potential candidates, “and right now don’t have a favorite.”
That’s not surprising, given the early stage of the race. The question is whether any candidate will do enough to satisfy some activists. As Rogers-Wright noted, the Democratic Party has not developed a plan to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “Sure, they believe in [climate change],” Rogers-Wright said. “But as it pertains to acting on it, they’ve been anemic at best.”
In fact, none of the potential Democratic candidates—aside from Sanders, who ran in 2016—has released such a plan, either. But there is time yet for that, and pressure from environmentalists may well compel them to do so. As Miller said, “This is finally going to be the climate election that we’ve been waiting for.”
Emily Atkin is a staff writer at The New Republic.
@emorwee
Climate Change, Elizabeth Warren, Jay Inslee, Global Warming, Politics, Environment, Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Green New Deal
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News / 2008 / monthJanuary February March April May June July August September October November December
Wada talks global markets
In a recent interview, Yoichi Wada shared his insights on the current health and future of his company within the various regional markets in which it operates. The president of Square Enix also assessed the successes of Final Fantasy XI, the acquisition of Taito, and the present status of the Japanese games market as a whole. Read more
08 Jan 2008 by Eddy ↑ 12 ↓ discuss permalink
Traversing "Distant Worlds"
North River Road is a path I regard with fondness, for is was inside the Rosemont Theater, located on this bustling boulevard, that I first met with what had up until recently been the definitive experience in my video-game-themed concert outings: the world premiere of "PLAY! A Video Game Symphony" on May 27, 2006. For me, it was a true spectacle unlike any before it, featuring an assortment of wonderful musical pieces from blockbuster video game titles performed by a full orchestra and choir, led by Grammy-Award-winning music director Arnie Roth. Memories of Akira Yamaoka's electric guitar screeching the sounds of Silent Hill, Koji Kondo's New Super Mario Bros. piano solo, and Angela Aki performing "Kiss Me Good-Bye" and "Eyes On Me" still, to this day, glisten freshly in my mind with deep affection. Indeed, it was a show to reckon with. Nearly two years later, on March 1, 2008, I was fortunate enough to return to this street and adjacent performance hall for the North American debut of "Distant Worlds: music from FINAL FANTASY." Full Article
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Emotional Rescue: The Heart-Brain Connection
By: Michael Miller, M.D.
Editor’s Note: The silent, often subconscious conversation that is taking place inside us is one of the most vital communications we will ever find ourselves engaged in. It’s the dialogue of emotion-based signals between our hearts and our brains, also known as the heart-brain connection. Our author tells us what research has uncovered and some of the keys to a longer, healthier life.
Illustration by EGADS
W e’ve known for decades that smoking, hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes account for most cardiovascular problems. But it wasn’t until publication of the Interheart study (25,000 volunteers spanning 52 countries) that emotional stress was identified as another key risk factor, accounting for about one-third of heart attacks and strokes. Previously, in the 1970s, when volunteers were asked to begin to count to 100 and then to serially subtract seven’s in quick succession (in a test of “mental stress”), blood vessels constricted as if they had taken and failed a cardiac stress test. Except in these cases, testing occurred at rest.
In other words, external stressors that are not effectively managed have direct internal implications by placing undue stress on the heart. Fast forward from the 1970s to the present era, and a recent study of more than 135,000 men and women in Sweden that found a history of stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, increased the risk of cardiovascular disease by more than 60 percent within just the first year of diagnosis.
Mechanistically, the underlying cause of a heart attack is a sudden rupture of an unstable plaque within a coronary artery. During stressful situations, the “fight-or-flight” response jumps into full gear, releasing biochemical compounds such as adrenaline, which raises heart rate and blood pressure, and signals platelets to release a chemical, neuropeptide Y, that can cause spasm and transient occlusion of the coronary artery.
Another cardiac condition that can result from acute emotional stress is Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, named for the Japanese octopus-trapping pot that the heart comes to resemble. Most commonly occurring after a sudden catastrophic event such as losing a spouse, an outpouring of adrenaline creates a transiently “shocked” state characterized by markedly abnormal contractions in a section of left ventricle and by heart failure. Resolution of the emotional crisis coupled with supportive care generally, but not always, leads to recovery of heart function.
Beyond single, severely stressful events, living day-to-day with stress is clearly associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke. We have only recently begun to understand the neurochemical pathways that generate atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. They include close communication between the central nervous system, heart, adrenal gland, and kidneys involved in the activation and release of stress hormones such as cortisol and heart damaging neuropeptides.
On another level, we have come to appreciate that chronic psychosocial or mental stress accelerates cardiovascular disease by promoting inflammation, oxidative stress, and abnormal function of the endothelium, the protective inner lining of our blood vessels.
Connecting to the Brain’s Emotional Coding Center
If we are to understand how to improve emotional health, it would be useful to probe the brain’s emotional coding center, the amygdala. As an undergraduate at Rutgers University, I had the opportunity to work with Drs. Arthur Kling and Robert Deutsch, a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist doing seminal research into the role of the amygdala in socialization and emotion. After Kling’s team induced frontal lobe lesions in rhesus monkeys and severed connections to the amygdala, their social interactions came to a near halt. Similar behavioral patterns have been reported following amygdalotomy for other emotional behaviors in humans, including pathologic aggression. Loss of socialization skills also occurred after prefrontal lobotomy, as I directly encountered when recording social interactions in patients who had undergone the procedure.
The association between high levels of social connectivity and favorable cardiovascular effects, including better outcomes after stroke, raises the possibility that a larger amygdala may afford cardioprotection. The Leiden Longevity Study supports this concept: large left amygdala volumes were not only associated with a high level of emotional health, but also correlated with familial longevity. By contrast, reduced social interactions caused by panic disorders have been associated with reduced amygdala volumes in the lateral and basal regions believed to process fear and anxiety. These disorders correlate with reduced parasympathetic tone, a known contributor to cardiovascular disease risk.
Amygdala activity has also been suggested to play a role in cardiovascular disease risk prediction. For example, residing in high-paced, crowded, noisy, and polluted cities leads to activation of the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region that regulates amygdala activity and response to psychosocial stress. Chronic exposure to stress results in allostatic load that adversely impacts brain plasticity and cardiovascular risk factors, including an exaggerated blood pressure response owing to activation of the perigenual cingulate cortex.
In a study conducted in Boston, increased amygdala activity at rest, assessed by PET/CT imaging, was also associated with blood vessel inflammation and risk of cardiovascular events over the next four years. The authors proposed that emotional stress signals a region of the amygdala to activate the sympathetic nervous system, promoting the production of pro-inflammatory white blood cells that may trigger heart attack, stroke, or sudden death. This study, among the first to demonstrate a direct relationship between emotional stressors and risk of cardiovascular events builds upon prior work identifying a direct association between amygdala reactivity (in response to threatening facial expressions) and increased carotid intima-media thickness, an anatomic biomarker of atherosclerosis and cardiovascular risk predictor.
Does counteracting negative stressors reduce cardiovascular risk? While no clinical outcome trials have been conducted to date, adoption of lifestyle strategies aimed at improving positive emotions seems to improve biomarkers of cardiovascular health, such as inflammation, arterial stiffness, and endothelial function. In my cardiology practice and as elaborated upon below, I recommend that my patients employ these five strategies to reduce day-to-day stressors:
1. Meditation (serotonin activated relaxation practices)
2. Yoga (GABA induced mood stabilization)
3. Laughter (endorphin mediated visual effects)
4. Music (dopamine regulated auditory effects
5. Massages, hugging (oxytocin activated tactile responses)
Relaxation Practices
There are several mechanisms by which relaxation strategies such as these improve biomarkers of cardiovascular risk. The first is improvement in parasympathetic tone, the heart’s ability to maintain blood pressure and/or heart rate in the face of daily stressors. (This contrasts with the “fight-or-flight” response described earlier, an adaptive physiological mechanism characterized by increased sympathetic tone with associated rise in blood pressure and heart rate). Examples include the inordinate or “hysterical” strength that arose in a daughter attempting to save her father who was pinned under a car and a mother fighting off a lion that attacked her son.
Such isolated “spring into action” situations have no lasting cardiovascular consequences in otherwise healthy individuals. But regularly occurring stressful situations can result in persistently heightened sympathetic tone. Under these conditions, the heart is chronically stressed by exaggerated blood pressure and heart rate responses that endure after the stressful situation is resolved. A persistent increase in sympathetic tone, moreover, raises the likelihood of inflammation, abnormal heart rhythms, and increased risk of sudden cardiac death.
On the other hand, reduced sympathetic or increased parasympathetic or vagal tone enables the heart to manage stressors, keeping blood pressure and heart rate under better control during stress, and shortening recovery time after activities that raise heart rate (such as aerobic activity). Relaxation strategies like those described above are among the most effective ways to improve parasympathetic tone. Their benefits are also indicated by tests using heat mapping to evaluate the expression of genes that promote oxidative stress and inflammation, important biomarkers for cardiovascular disease.
One recent study, for example, found that in a group that had practiced meditation on a regular basis, the expression of pro-inflammatory genes was reduced compared to those who had never mediated. In the second stage of the study, one half of the non-meditating group was randomly assigned to relaxation training sessions incorporating meditation, prayer, and yoga. After two months, genetic expression of pro-inflammatory genes resembled that of long-time meditators. Practicing relaxation also reduced the expression of genes promoting insulin resistance, the forerunner of Type 2 diabetes. The results of this study not only affirmed the importance of brain-heart connections on a molecular level but found that relaxation can have a robust effect in a very short time, supporting the adage “never too late to start.”
Mindfulness meditation , which has become one of the most popular relaxation practices over the past decade, combines heightened, non-judgmental awareness of one’s surroundings and feelings with slow deep breathing exercises. A stress-reduction program based on mindfulness has been associated with improvement in hypertension and depression, while strengthening the immune system and raising activity of telomerase, an enzyme that slows biological aging.
Researchers have also studied the cardiovascular impact of practices that incorporate relaxation and movement. Yoga and Tai Chi, for example, improve balance and coordination to help the elderly prevent falls and fractures, and bolster strength and stabilization. In cardiovascular terms, yoga is associated with reduced systolic blood pressure and cholesterol: a recent meta-analysis of 49 trials found that three sessions of yoga weekly reduced systolic blood pressure as much as low-dose antihypertensive medication. Tai Chi has been shown to help suppress inflammation and depression, both cardiovascular disease risk factors. Finally, yoga may also raise brain levels of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a neurotransmitter involved in mood stabilization and stress reduction and both yoga and meditation practices lead to the release of serotonin, another important neurotransmitter involved in mood regulation.
While it has long been thought that laughter can induce a sense of well-being through the release of endorphins, its connection to cardiovascular health has only become apparent in recent years. Specifically, the β-endorphins released by a hearty belly laugh bind to receptors on the surface of the vascular endothelium to release nitric oxide, a molecule with multiple cardioprotective properties. Recent studies have, in fact, found the risk of heart attack and stroke is reduced in individuals who laugh on a regular basis, compared to those who never or rarely laugh. Laughter also reduces stiffness and aging of blood vessels, including those in the brain.
A popular way to combine laughter with deep breathing techniques is through laughter yoga. The origins of this practice date back to 1995 when Dr. Madan Kataria, a family physician, assembled a small group in a public park in Mumbai, who met each morning to laugh together through a series of funny expressions and movements that Dr. Kataria devised. Nearly 25 years later, more than 15,000 laughter yoga clubs exist in more than 70 countries worldwide.
A typical session lasts from 30 to 60 minutes, during which a leader engages participants in exercises designed to elicit forced laughter that converts to emotional laughter as the session wears on. One popular exercise is “milkshake or cocktail laughter,” where participants pretend to pour a glass of milk (or cocktail) into one hand saying “here” then into the other hand repeating “here” and then pretending to drink it or discard it behind their shoulder with repeated laughter.
The benefits of laughter yoga include decreased cortisol levels and systolic blood pressure, as well as improvement in indices of depression and overall life satisfaction. While research in this field remains sparse, the encouraging results from these small-scaled studies support the development of a clinical trial in which laughter therapy is one component of an integrated therapeutic lifestyle designed to reduce cardiovascular events.
A number of studies have demonstrated that listening to joyful music offers cardioprotective and neurobiological effects, including reduced inflammation, blood pressure and heart rate, improved parasympathetic tone, and shortened recovery following surgery. The “frisson effect,” or the feeling of chills down the spine is a physiological consequence related to the release of dopamine in response to listening to or anticipating pleasurable music. A pilot study suggested that focusing on this sensation (i.e., mindful music) may be a useful intervention to speed recovery following stroke.
The Moral Molecule
The hormone and neurotransmitter oxytocin, released from the posterior pituitary during physical encounters such as touching and hugging, can lower blood pressure and heart rate. More surprisingly, research in recent years has demonstrated that the compound has a direct cardioprotective effect. In animal models, administration of oxytocin not only prevents the death of heart tissue that results in heart failure but may also regenerate new cells. In human studies, intranasal oxytocin has been shown to improve parasympathetic tone during a mental stress test and may offer relief in chronic pain; the latter has intriguing cardiovascular implications, because chronic pain is associated with increased risk of death from heart disease and stroke.
More work needs to be done to pinpoint the impact of many of the practices mentioned above. But there is already enough research to conclude that effective management of day-to-day psychosocial stressors is vital to good overall heart and brain health. Beyond good nutrition and regular physical activity, then, consider practicing meditation or yoga on a routine basis. Laugh, listen to music, and hug your favorite people and pets. Such are the keys to a longer, happier life.
Financial Disclosure: The author has no conflicts of interest to report.
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US drone kills top Al-Qaeda commander
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A US air strike killed a senior Al Qaeda commander along with two other militants in southeastern Paktika, the Pentagon said Friday.
Dawn.com stated the attack occurred on July 11 which killed Abu Khalil al-Sudani, a "high-ranking Al-Qaeda operational commander" and in charge of suicide bombing, the Pentagon said in a statement released to reporters in Iraq who were travelling with US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter.
"Al-Sudani was one of three known violent extremists killed in the strike. The death of al-Sudani will further degrade Al Qaeda operations across the globe," the statement said.
The Pentagon described Sudani as a senior shura member and head of Al Qaeda's suicide and explosive operations, and said he was directly linked to plotting attacks against the United States.
"He also directed operations against Coalition, Afghan and Pakistani forces, and maintained a close association with Aymar al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's leader," the statement said.
In the statement, Carter said the killing of Sudani underscored the work done by General John Campbell, the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, and his troops "to take the fight to Al Qaeda".
"We will continue to counter violent extremism in the region and the world," Carter said
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Time to Fix a Broken Congress
by tom behr | May 14, 2017 | Common Sense
Regardless of which party you support (in my case, it’s neither), it should be transparently clear that Congress as a governing body is hopelessly, incurably broken. What we have, instead, with too few exceptions, are self-serving ideologues fighting for political control while working a three-day week and selling out to lobbyists to keep themselves in power. It’s time to throw the bums out. But only the American electorate can do that – if we Americans wake up to our responsibility. The architect of our current government dysfunction is Newt Gingrich. (What else would you expect from someone named after a lizard?) The Tea Party Republicans (aka the radical Freedom Caucus) just caused the cancer of big-money-supported partisan wars to metastasize. But assigning blame for the mess we’re in to Republicans is beside the point – most congressional Democrats are just as culpable and dysfunctional now as Republicans. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/05/is_there_any_future_in_being_a_moderate_republican.html The Democrats suffered through eight years of nasty hypocritical attacks and legislative inertia by the Republicans against President Obama. Now that Republicans are in power, most Democrats are similarly obsessed by attacking President Trump instead of putting better solutions in front of the public. To be sure, Trump’s policies should be attacked. For starters, he has abandoned his campaign commitments to the working class Americans who provided him his victory. Forget the “Buy America, Hire America” rhetoric. With the active support of congressional Republicans, he’s reneging on his promises to foster job growth, bring manufacturing back to the United States from abroad, increase wages, protect retirees against predatory investment schemes, protect workers from greed-driven occupational harm, and ensure that all Americans,...
Canada to Close Its Borders on January 21 to American Political Refugees
by tom behr | Dec 10, 2016 | Common Sense
Alert to readers: Please see note at end. As a summertime Canadian resident at our vacation home in Nova Scotia, I check out the Globe and Mail after I return to New Jersey, and this story by Globe and Mail reporter Isaac Bickerstaff caught my attention. He cites reputable sources who report on private conversations being held among Canadian Parliamentary leaders. “We Canadians have always looked up to America,” Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is reported to have said. “Actually, it’s probably been a lot more like envy. But as we see Mr. Trump in action as the president elect, it’s turning to genuine alarm. For people less polite than we Canadians, the proper response might even be disgust.” “Mr. Trump has already established a bizarre approach to dealing with leaders of foreign governments. He treats us as if we were potential contestants for “the Apprentice.” I got a call from him at supper time a few days ago. Strange as it was, I took the call. I decided to end it when Mr. Trump suggested that America should just buy Canada in order to get our oil. The next day, he tweeted this response. “Of course, Mr. Trump is buddy buddy with some foreign leaders, such as Vladimir Putin. Actually he, and his Secretary of State choice, Exxon Mobil Corp Chief Executive Officer Rex Tillerson, will make a bundle from cozying up to Russia. Mr. Trump’s answer, ‘I like people who made a fortune.’ “When one looks at how you Americans elect presidents, perhaps it explains the strange people you wind up with: you spend several years and...
America’s New (un)Civil War – Part II
by tom behr | Oct 23, 2016 | Common Sense
The furor over Donald Trump’s increasingly pitiful, dangerous insistence that the election is being “stolen” from him by the evil forces of tyranny abetted by a corrupted media, should be an early warning call. The spirit of violent rebellion is rising again against the injustice and corruption of a government that has stopped listening to, serving, and respecting its people. Rebellion is deeply woven into the fabric of America’s existence. We are, as the ancient Romans would have understood, Janus-faced: one part of our instinctive, permanent character is loyalty, the other rebellion. But our survival as a democracy “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” depends on our ability to manage that inner conflict without ripping ourselves apart as a nation. It’s a daunting challenge. We were born in an act of rebellion against the legally-constituted government of Great Britain. But it was also a civil war between “Loyalists” (or Tories) against “Rebels” (or Patriots). It divided families and, pitted brothers against brothers and friends against friends. Eighty-two years later, the tensions that divide us erupted again in a frightful, tragic civil war. In my family on my mother’s side, it was called “The War Between the States,” or, more bitterly, “The War of Northern Aggression.” The Thomas family emigrated to America from Scotland in 1651 and settled in Virginia. My great grandfather, Lovick Thomas II, lived in Decatur, Georgia. He served as Colonel of the 42nd Georgia Infantry. I’ve read the diary kept by his wife, Jane Peeples Thomas and the letters they exchanged during the war. What emerges, roughly 150 years later, is a...
Global Warming: Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?
It shouldn’t be that hard to get. Republicans who cling to the Koch Brothers’ and the oil industry’s denial of global warming offer the excuse “I’m not a scientist.” Well, OK. Asking members of Congress (of both parties) to make logical decisions based on impartial, empirical observation of facts is asking too much. But try this 5th grade experiment: Fill a glass with water and an ice cube almost to the brim. Place it in the hot sun (we’re getting a lot more of that these days, if you hadn’t noticed…). If you’re in a hurry, put it in a microwave What happens? Next question: Are the polar icecaps and glaciers around the world melting? You can check that by looking at photos – unless you believe there’s a world-wide conspiracy by some all-powerful nefarious group like the Trilateral Commission, The Illuminati, The U.N. , or the new World Order to doctor ALL the satellite photographs we see (the way they did with the Apollo moon landings LOL). Or you could actually ask a scientist (not the ones paid by the Koch Brothers and Mobil/Exxon). 97% of them would tell you that global warming is happening, its consequences can be destructive to all life on the planet (including ours), and that current human behavior is making it worse. So why does this matter on November 8th? By then it will have cost over 7 billion dollars (that’s $7,000,000,000, incidentally) to decide between two presidential candidates neither of whom many of us really trust, or like. In fact, because of today’s politics of lies, leaks, and character assassination, the only...
Living in Crazy World
Living in Crazy World JoAnn and I were on our way home yesterday from a gathering with friends when this news feed showed up on her IPhone: “ABC reports that President Obama has just signed an Executive Order outlawing the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools.” I almost drove of the road in shock. “How could he do that?” “Why would he do that?” “Has his mind been taken over by Extraterrestrial Aliens (or the Koch brothers?)” That was followed by the conviction “This is crazy, President Obama wouldn’t do that.” Of course it was crazy. When I got home and raced to fire up my laptop to find out what was really going on, I discovered it was all a hoax. But tellingly, my first reaction was to treat this report as “news.” I think about this hoax now, which might be just an irresponsibly stupid prank but could as easily be a malicious attack of politically-driven misinformation. I can easily imagine Obama’s and Hillary’s detractors repeating it as gospel. “Have you heard what they’re doing now! We need to put both of them in jail!” We have serious drug problems in this country. But the most dangerous, in terms of the largest number of existing and potential addicts, is the narcotic of fear. We shoot up every time we turn on the “news,” respond to “anti-Social Media,” or pass along rumors with people who share our beliefs. “Trump is going to destroy American democracy and turn us into a dictatorship.” “Hillary is in league with the World Bank, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group to destroy...
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SPO wins Excellence in Manpower Training and Development Award
SPO wins Environment Protection Award
SPO wins Leadership in Sustainability Award
Swire Seabed - Addition of two mobile WROVs with Launch & Recovery systems
Launch of Vessel - Pacific Grackle
SPO wins SRS Shipowner of the Year Award 2015
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Centurion & Pacific Goldfinch
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Liberty
Sustainable Business Award 28 Nov 2014
Altus Logistics - Solar panel system
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Legend
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Gannet
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Legacy
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Dragon
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Leader
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Dispatch
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Discovery
Book launch for Sir Jonathon Porritt
Naming Ceremony - Pacific Duchess
Senior Management Changes at Swire Pacific Offshore
Swire Pacific Offshore today announced that Neil Glenn will take over as Managing Director of Swire Pacific Offshore Operations (Pte) Ltd (SPO) with effect from 1st November 2011. Mr Glenn takes over from Brian Townsley who retires after working for the Company for more than 35 years, including close to 3 years as Managing Director. Mr Townsley will continue his connection with SPO by maintaining his position on the Board.
J.B. Rae-Smith, Executive Director of Swire Pacific, said, "We thank Brian very much for his many years of service to the Company both on and offshore. Brian brought with him a unique mix of talents as he had served as Master on our fleet during the early years of the Company and rapidly rose through the ranks when he came ashore. We wish him a well-earned retirement with his family in France."
Incoming Managing Director, Neil Glenn, said, "It's a great honour to follow in the footsteps of Brian as Managing Director of Swire Pacific Offshore. Brian leaves the Company in a strong financial position with impressive orderbook of vessels that will take the fleet size to over 100 vessels by the end of 2015. I wish him all the best in his retirement."
Neil Glenn, aged 42, joined John Swire & Sons in 1990 and has had held a broad range of marketing, operational, logistics, commercial and leadership positions within the private and public Swire companies. He has spent the majority of his career in shipping but has also gained valuable senior management experience in other industry sectors. Before re-joining Swire Pacific Offshore in 2009 as the Commercial Director, he was the Director & General Manager of HK Aero Engine Services Ltd, a joint venture between HAECO, Rolls Royce and Singapore Airlines Engineering Company and prior to that was Managing Director of Kalari & Transwest, the Group's road transport operations in Australia.
He is a graduate of Oxford University and is married with 3 children.
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Palparan’s flee attempt indicates guilt – mothers of 2 missing UP students
“He [Palparan] should be imprisoned immediately, along with GMA, Abalos, all of them who are shameless. They all should spend Christmas in jail.” – Mrs. Concepcion Empeño
By RONALYN V. OLEA
MANILA – The mothers of the two missing students of the University of the Philippines (UP) are enraged over the attempt of retired Gen. Jovito Palparan Jr. to leave the country this morning.
Exactly four days ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a resolution implicating Palparan, then commanding officer of the 7th Infantry Battalion of the Philippine Army and three of his men into the disappearance of UP students Sherlyn Cadapan and Karen Empeño.
According to reports, Palparan tried to go to Singapore around 7:30 a.m. on board a Seair flight but was prevented by immigration officials.
“Why would he escape? This only proves all the more that he is guilty of many crimes,” Mrs. Concepcion Empeño, mother of Karen, told Bulatlat.com in a phone interview..... MORE
URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2011/12/19/palparan%E2%80%99s-flee-attempt-indicates-guilt-%E2%80%93-mothers-of-2-missing-up-students/
Half of America is officially poor
While it’s no surprise that nearly 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, new statistics from the US Census show that almost 100 million others are counted as low-income citizens, making half of the population of America officially poor.
The latest figures out of the US Census Bureau show that in addition to the 49.1 million Americans who fall below the official poverty line, those that rake in enough to be between that level and the income equitable to double it fall into a new “low-income” category, which counts an additional 97.3 million people. Altogether, that clump of nearly 150 million Americans living in dire economic standing accounts for around 48 percent of the US population..... MORE
URL: http://rt.com/usa/news/half-poor-america-poverty-909/
Carnivorous plant doubles as bat hotel
A rare meat-eating pitcher plant has re-made its insect traps into night shelters for tiny bats to have their feces as reward.
The nepenthes rafflesiana elongate, a variety of the species also known as Raffles' pitcher plant, grows in Brunei’s muggy peat forests. It is remarkably poor at catching insects, unlike its many cousins, capturing about one seventh as many..... MORE
URL: http://rt.com/news/sci-tech/plant-bat-hotel-pitcher/
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il dies (w/ Video)
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il dies
North Korea's veteran leader Kim Jong-il has died at the age of 69. A tearful announcer at North Korea’s state television, dressed in black, said on Monday the “Dear Leader” had died on Saturday morning of fatigue and over-work.
Kim Jong-il had been battling ailing health in recent years. It is believed he suffered a stroke in 2008.
The news has apparently shocked the people of North Korea. Kim Jong-il had ruled the country since the death of his father, Kim Il-sung, in 1994. Kim Jong-il's youngest son, Kim Jong-un, who is in his late 20s, has officially been named as his father’s successor – that is according to Reuters, who cite the country’s Central Telegraph Agency..... MORE
URL: http://rt.com/news/north-korea-jong-il-dies-111/
Forty-year roller coaster for Bangladeshi Hindus focus 12/18/2011
Forty-year roller coaster for Bangladeshi Hindus
DHAKA — When Bangladesh became an independent nation after a bloody nine month battle with Pakistan that ended 40 years ago Friday, Narayan Chandra Das, a Bengali Hindu, had high hopes for his new country.
As a Hindu, Das had been branded an “agent of India” during the war and fled when the Pakistani army burned his village in the eastern district of Comilla to the ground.
But when the war ended on Dec. 16, he came straight home to the new Muslim-majority nation.
Forty years after independence, creeping Islamization, discriminatory policies and a series of violent attacks on Hindus, have, he says, made him wonder whether it was the right choice..... MORE
Pursue rights violation cases vs GMA, minions
By Satur C. Ocampo
At Ground Level | The Philippine Star
“Our gathering this morning is an opportunity to further assess the strengths and weaknesses of the present criminal justice system, and to come up with new and timely initiatives concerning the delivery of justice… Your decisions and the steps you take have implications integral to our democracy.”
That’s how President Aquino defined the objective of the First National Criminal Justice Summit, a laudable initiative by the Department of Justice, which he addressed last Monday at the Manila Hotel. We missed being informed of the summit’s output because the media coverage focused on P-Noy’s frontal tirades against the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Renato Corona.
Nonetheless, the President raised a point highly relevant to today’s observance of Human Rights Day: the injustice inflicted by Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law regime upon his father, Ninoy Aquino, the opposition leader who was later assassinated and now regarded as a hero.
Ninoy and Jose W. Diokno, then both senators, were arrested and held for two years in isolated military detention. Whereas Diokno was freed without being charged with any offense, Ninoy was dragooned into trial and conviction by court martial on trumped-up murder and related common criminal charges.
P-Noy summed up that ignoble procedure thus: “The dictatorship exerted all efforts to skew justice and run roughshod over my father’s human rights.”
With that flashback, P-Noy emphasized that he had sworn “to do justice to every man” in executing the laws and “to make certain that what transpired during martial law does not happen again, and ensuring that anyone who so much as attempts to repeat the same offenses is held accountable.”
Fast-forward to the plight of 356 political prisoners all over the country, who have been on a week-long fast/hunger strike to press for their immediate release. They have been charged, like Ninoy, with trumped-up common criminal offenses. The reality is that they were arrested for holding political beliefs different from those approved by those in power..... MORE
URL: http://bulatlat.com/main/2011/12/16/pursue-rights-violation-cases-vs-gma-minions/
Manipulating the system TABLETS OF STONE Larry Faraon, OP 12/18/2011
Manipulating the system
Not even a democratic system is impeccable either from the mechanics or dynamics itself of the same or from given human intransigence and imperfections operating within that system. The tragedy lies in that there is no escape except the destruction of the system itself and the demise of those who wheels the inherent cyclical pattern within.
Our so called democracy has always metamorphose into a “democrazy” especially when the sub-institutions within the democratic system clash and mash against each other necessarily or unnecessarily. And we, the ordinary people, become helpless observers from below while the observers from above are helping themselves in taking advantage of the distractions and diversions as they freely “mind their own businesses.”.... MORE
Palparan’s flee attempt indicates guilt – mothers ...
Forty-year roller coaster for Bangladeshi Hindus f...
Manipulating the system TABLETS OF STONE Larry Far...
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Lung Cancer Screening Awareness Campaign Focuses on At-Risk Kentuckians
By Allison Perry June 17, 2019
UK is a partner in a new statewide education campaign focused on lung cancer screening awareness.
LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 17, 2019) – The GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer (formerly known as Lung Cancer Alliance and the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation) is conducting a statewide education campaign in partnership with the University of Kentucky to bring lung cancer screening awareness to the thousands of Kentuckians at risk for the disease. The campaign stems from the Kentucky LEADS Collaborative (Lung Cancer, Education, Awareness, Detection, Survivorship), a project led by UK, University of Louisville, and the GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer.
As part of the Kentucky LEADS effort to reduce lung cancer in the state, educational ads are airing in cable television markets throughout the state, urging current and former heavy smokers 55 years and older to talk to a clinician about lung cancer screening. It is also being shared via social media. The ad, Live More Moments, stresses the importance of early detection in increasing survivorship and leads viewers to a custom website that provides a list of hospitals that conduct responsible screenings.
"Kentucky has the highest incidence of lung cancer diagnosis and mortality in the country, and we have been working diligently with our Kentucky LEADS partners over the past four years to reverse this statistic and save lives," said Laurie Fenton-Ambrose, co-founder, president and CEO of the GO2 Foundation for Lung Cancer. UK and UofL join the GO2Foundation in guiding the Kentucky LEADS Collaborative that includes scientists, clinicians, advocates, and community partners from more than 50 organizations throughout the state. The Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation provides support for the Kentucky LEADS Collaborative with a multi-year grant.
The Kentucky LEADS mission is to reduce the burden of lung cancer in Kentucky and beyond through the development, evaluation, and dissemination of innovative, community-based interventions that focus on three key components: prevention and early detection, provider education, and survivorship care.
"Screening education and awareness are critical parts of the effort to reverse Kentucky's substantial lung cancer burden, and Kentucky LEADS messaging is that screening is available for those at risk and could save their life or that of a loved one," said Jamie Studts, Ph.D., principal investigator of the Kentucky LEADS Collaborative and professor in UK's College of Medicine Department of Behavioral Science and the UK Markey Cancer Center.
In addition to supporting lung cancer screening efforts, Kentucky LEADS has developed continuing education programming for primary care clinicians stressing early detection, diagnosis and treatment, tobacco treatment, and survivorship. Kentucky LEADS has also developed and tested a new lung cancer survivorship program that works with local survivorship care specialists to help improve quality of life among individuals diagnosed with lung cancer patient. For more information visit kentuckyleads.org.
Allison Perry
allison.perry@uky.edu
Caroline Fuchs, cfuchs@go2foundation.org
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Two or Three Things I Know About Her
Written for the screen and directed by Jean-Luc Godard from an article by Catherine Vimenet, Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her) is the story of the life of a housewife who works as a prostitute to support her family as they live in a high-rise building in Paris. The film is the study of a woman dealing with an increasingly consumerist world that demands so much as it’s a film that explore many themes marking the start of a transitional period for Godard. Starring Marina Vlady, Anny Duperey, Robert Montsoret, Raoul Levy, Jean Narboni, and Christophe Boursellier. Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d’elle is a compelling yet unconventional film from Jean-Luc Godard.
The film follows the life of a housewife who at night works as a prostitute to pay off simple things such as bills and grocery for her family as they live in a high-rise building in Paris that is becoming dominated by ideas of capitalism and American products. It’s a film that is really an exploration about the increasing demands of modernism in Paris where this woman is struggling to get by as she has to prostitute herself to support her family where her husband works in a garage and listens to a ham radio about the Vietnam War. The film doesn’t really have a traditional narrative that follows the life of Juliette Jeanson (Marina Vlady) as she would comment about her own previous life before she and her family moved to Paris in this high-rise. Yet, much of the film features images of products, pictures of the Vietnam War, American pop culture, and references to books and films as it’s quietly narrated by Jean-Luc Godard who comments about the story he’s telling but also his growing disdain towards what Paris is becoming.
Godard’s direction does have elements of style in some of the compositions he creates yet much of his presentation is simple and emphasizes more on what is happening in and around Paris as it is a major character of the film. While Godard avoids many of the city’s famous landmarks in favor of places that are being built to display this modern version of the city that features lots of shots of big cranes and bridges and buildings being built. Godard would use wide shots as well as create careful compositions through his narration to showcase this ever-changing world that is losing its identity in favor of this bright and colorful world of American pop culture. Even in a scene where Juliette and a friend in Marianne (Anny Duperey) are doing a job with an American client in John Bogus (Raoul Levy) who is wearing an American t-shirt and such as he makes the two wear airline shopping bags on their heads.
There are also these moments that does stray from Juliette’s story where her husband Robert (Roger Montsoret) is listening to his ham radio while he’s in a scene talking to another woman (Juliet Berto) at a restaurant where a couple of men are reading books and such that relate to the political climate of the times. There are also these moments in the film where the fourth wall breaks as the actors would talk or look in front of the camera to answer certain questions from Godard who films them in a close-up or in a medium shot. Even as it add to this blur of reality and fiction but also this atmosphere that Godard is in where one can’t help but be overwhelmed by these surroundings and vast imagery of American products rampant all over the city. Overall, Godard creates a whimsical yet haunting film about the life of a housewife who supports her family as a prostitute in an ever-changing Paris filled with consumerism and modernism.
Cinematographer Raoul Coutard does brilliant work with the film’s colorful cinematography that captures the vibrancy of the locations and its colors as well as maintaining a look that is full of wonders in its modernist setting. Editors Francoise Collin and Chantal Delattre do excellent work with the editing as its stylish usage of jump-cuts and montages play into this sense of overwhelming images of modernism and a world where money and products become king. Costume designer Gitt Magrini does fantastic work with the costumes in the design of the dresses that the women wear as it add to the personality of the characters but also this pressure to be part of society because the clothes are what is fashionable. The sound work of Antoine Bonfanti and Rene Levert is terrific for its naturalistic approach to the sound as it add to this atmosphere of confusion and uncertainty while much of the film’s music soundtrack mainly features a classical piece by Ludwig Van Beethoven.
The film’s wonderful cast feature some notable small roles from Christophe Boursellier and Marie Boursellier as Juliette and Robert’s children, Juliet Berto as a young woman Robert talks to at a restaurant, Jean Narboni as a friend of Robert, Raoul Levy as an American client named John Bogus, and Anny Duperey as a young prostitute in Marianne who also deals with the demands of sex to support her own lifestyle. Roger Montsoret is superb as Juliette’s husband Robert as a mechanic who works at a garage to support his family as he becomes concerned with the state of the world including the Vietnam War. Finally, there’s Marina Vlady in an incredible performance as Juliette Jeanson as a housewife who copes with the increasing demands of her family’s new environment forcing herself to become a prostitute where she also deals with existential questions and such relating to her situation.
Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d’elle is a sensational film from Jean-Luc Godard. Featuring a great cast, Raoul Coutard’s vibrant cinematography, and its themes of Paris becoming modernized and driven by the ultra-consumerist world of American capitalism. It's a film that explore the life of a woman who is struggling to keep with the demands of modern society as the film would also mark a transitional period for Godard from straying from the conventions of traditional narratives in favor of exploring themes of politics and social issues. In the end, Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d’elle is a phenomenal film from Jean-Luc Godard.
Jean-Luc Godard Films: All the Boys Are Called Patrick - Charlotte et Son Jules - A Bout de Souffle - The Little Soldier - A Woman is a Woman - Vivre sa Vie - Les Carabiniers - Contempt - Bande a Part - (A Married Woman) - Alphaville - Pierrot Le Fou - Masculin Feminin - Made in U.S.A. - (La Chinoise) - Weekend – Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One) - (Joy of Learning) - (Tout va Bien) - (Letter to Jane) - (One A.M.) - (Number Two) - (Here and Elsewhere) - (Every Man for Himself) - (Passion) - (First Name: Carmen) - (Hail Mary) - (Soft and Hard) - (Detective) - (King Lear (1987 film)) - (Keep Your Right Up) - (Novelle Vague) - (Allemagne 90 neuf zero) - (JLG/JLG - Self-Portrait in December) - (For Ever Mozart) - (Historie(s) de Cinema) - (In Praise of Love) - (Notre musique) - (Film Socialisme) - (Adieu au Language) – (The Image Book)
Labels: anny duperey, jean narboni, jean-luc godard, marina vlady, raoul levy, robert montsoret
Brittani Burnham said...
This sounds very intriguing. Great review!
Films That I Saw: March 2019
2019 Blind Spot Series: Weekend (1967 film)
Us (2019 film)
Thursday Movie Picks: Private Eye
Oliver Twist (1948 film)
Thursday Movie Picks: Films You Thought You Would...
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
Thursday Movie Picks: Cold War
The Green Ray
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Ermatinger’s 1844 Petition for Incorporation
OREGON CITY’S FIRST OFFICIAL DOCUMENT
“To the Honorable the House of Representatives, We humble petitioners pray that the Town which is called Oregon City, situated at the falls of the Willamette on the East side of the Willamette River, may be incorporated Oregon City; that we may be enabled to adopt such Regulations as will benefit its inhabitances (sic) and secure peace and give good order to all of the people of Said town.
Frs. Ermatinger, F.W. Pettygrove, John P. Brooks, William C. Dement, Alanson C. Husted, J.B. Wood, John Harwell, N.S. Mack, A.E. Wilson, E. White, John McCadden, J.R. Robb, J.L. Morrison, J. Hawn, P.H. Hatch”
On June 26th, 1844, A.L. Lovejoy presented the Oregon Provisional legislature with a petition from Francis Ermatinger to incorporate the City of Oregon City. This document yet survives in the Oregon State Archives as Oregon Provisional and Territorial document No. 3. It is written in Ermatinger’s hand.
While ultimately the petition was not adopted, it represents the first official document of Oregon City and gives us a unique insight into its establishment. By December 1844, Oregon City officialy became the first incorporated city west of the Rocky Mountains.
The small list of signatories includes key members of government and commerce: ElijahWhite, the only Federal official then present in Oregon, F.W. Petygrove, representative of A.G. and A.W. Benson&Co. (New York City), and A.E. Wilson of Cushing & Co (Newburyport, Mass). Also signing were J.L. Morison, namesake of Morison Street in Portland and one of its first residents, and Jacob Hawn, proprietor of Hawn’s Mill near Far West, Missouri, site of the infamous massacre during the 1838 MormonWar.
It’s likely that Ermatinger was submitting this petition, as he had in the past, on behalf of Dr.McLoughlin as part of his efforts to secure the Oregon City claim. As Chief Factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, McLoughlin would not have easily been able to directly participate in the Provisional Government.
While Lovejoy and Pettygrove are remembered today mostly for their involvement with the establishment of Portland, the petition reflects their significance in the story of OregonCity. Lovejoy would go on to serve as the Mayor, and Pettygrove as Treasurer until his resignation after relocating to Portland in 1846 (Pettygrove ultimately resided longer at Oregon City than Portland). At the time of Ermatinger’s petition, Lovejoy was also engaged as McLoughlin’s attorney. Pettygrove would subsequently form a business partnership with McLoughlin’s son, David.
Brandon Shaw2019-03-27T21:47:04+00:00
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Story Number 3
625 Center St, Oregon City, OR 97045
Email: info@travelOregonCity.com
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End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center
Willamette Falls Legacy Project
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Copyright 2018 Oregon City | All Rights Reserved. This project was made possible in part by a grant from Travel Oregon. Design by Rotator Creative.
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